


time has brought your heart to me

by lovealwayskatie



Category: High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (TV)
Genre: F/M, another one of those timer soulmate AUs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24689461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovealwayskatie/pseuds/lovealwayskatie
Summary: With TiMERs, you’ve already found your soulmate, or you’re on the journey to finding them, or you need to start that journey to them now, like right now, and Nini just thought she would be on her way at this point. / in which Nini waits for her countdown to begin and Ricky doesn't even believe in soulmates in the first place
Relationships: Ricky Bowen/Nini Salazar-Roberts
Comments: 58
Kudos: 165
Collections: rini





	1. all this time i was waiting for you

**Author's Note:**

> every fandom ends up with this soulmate trope eventually, so i thought i'd take one for the team. it's evolved into a larger thing than anticipated so it's officially a two shot with the second part coming shortly.
> 
> based on the film Timer (2009) and the better known tumblr post about this soulmate concept. title is from “a thousand years” by christina perri and chapter titles are from "all this time" from onerepublic.

**_With a TiMER, finding the one isn’t an if but a when._ **

Now that she’s living off-campus with Kourtney and Ashlyn for her junior year, she figures that it’s time to find a new go-to place for her daily caffeine fix, and Pause Café, the coffee shop within walking distance of their apartment with leafy hanging plants in its bay window, seems like the prime candidate.

One Tuesday in September before her music theory class, she decides to check it out, the bell above the door twinkling as she enters. The café is flooded with natural light and the rich smell of espresso, and it’s filled with plush armchairs and two-top tables. Books are lined up along the bench of the bay window, and she catches old editions of Alice in Wonderland and The Catcher in the Rye with gold leaf lettering on their spines. It’s clearly a spot for college students in the same way most businesses in Hartford are filled with people all within a four-year age range, sporting backpacks and dark circles under their eyes at all times.

She steps up to the counter, and the boy behind it has messy brown curls and a hole in the shoulder of his faded San Francisco Giants T-shirt. “Can I have a medium iced latte?”

“Yep,” he says, ringing her up, and she catches a flash of a dimple when he smiles at her. A blender is switched on behind them when their eyes meet, and the loud noise startles her, a jolt to her system this early in the morning. Unbothered, he picks up a cup, uncapped Sharpie in hand, and asks, “What’s your name?”

“Nini,” she tells him and out of habit for all the name butchering and misspelling she’s endured at the hands of other baristas, she spells it out for him. “N-i-n-i.”

“Nini,” he repeats, testing her name out for himself as he writes it on the side of the cup before he gives her another smile. “I like that.”

“Ah, well, it’s actually Nina,” she replies. “But no one actually calls me that unless they hate me or we’re not friends or. . .” She can’t imagine that he possibly cares about this.

But he nods and says, “Totally know what you mean. I’m Richard technically but Ricky in actuality.” She considers his wrinkled shirt and how he holds the Sharpie between his teeth in order to put the cap back on. He’s definitely a Ricky. Who under the age of eighty-five is named Richard anyway?

He makes her drink, the whirl of the espresso machine mixing with the music they have on in the café, and when he slides it over the counter to her, it says NINI on the side in marker. Beneath that, he’s written: _What do you call a fancy sea creature? Sofishticated_ and above the joke, there’s a cartoonish drawing of a fish wearing a top hat and monocle.

She looks up from the cup to the boy, her lips parted, ready to ask him about the whimsical additions to her cup, and he’s already looking back at her with a bright grin on his face. “Have a good day, Nini,” he tells her before moving onto the person behind her in line.

She’s out the door sipping her iced coffee, careful not to smudge the writing on her cup, before she realizes that she never got a look at his wrist.

\---

Nowadays, love stories look a little different. They are about the singular path that one is on, following a set trajectory that’s been decided on for you. Happy endings are accompanied by a clock that’s run out and the melodic beep one hears when meeting their soulmate for the first time. One doesn’t look for a match, a partner, a love but merely happens upon _the_ match, _the_ partner, _the_ one over the course of time, because your first love is your last love, your soulmate, your person, all wrapped into one.

And what guides all of this is the TiMER.

TiMERs were introduced to take the guesswork out of love. It leverages a database stocked with individuals’ personality assessments, health records, biometrics, essentially any miniscule facet that can be qualified and quantified about a person in order to find your soulmate. Your TiMER, a thin plastic strip adhered to the underside of your dominant wrist, is then able to pinpoint down to the second when you are set to meet that person for the first time.

When introduced at the turn of the millennium, TiMERs received both praise and criticism. Couples who had been together for years elected to get TiMERs with one another. Many, like Nini’s moms, timed out together instantaneously, reaffirming what they knew was true, and even more so, those couples were now able to point to their TiMERs as proof that their love was true and should be accepted. There were other stories, however, about couples that got TiMERs together that began to tick down at different rates, thus having to face the harsh reality that the person who they thought was the one was just a temporary distraction from their actual soulmate.

But as adoption rates picked up among the new generation who hadn’t had the misfortune of stumbling through life trying to find their person with no sense of direction, TiMERs became more popular, more accepted, now boasting a 99.8% satisfaction rate among newly matched couples.

Growing up, her moms were careful to never push TiMERs on her, but it didn’t matter. When it came to the little girl who grew up with her head filled with love songs, who begged her moms time and time again to retell the story of how they met pre-TiMER, it wasn’t a surprise when she insisted on getting a TiMER of her own as soon as she was of age.

And on her thirteenth birthday, Nini got her TiMER, blank and blinking up at her. At that time, her moms assured her that her blank TiMER was nothing to sweat over—she’d just become old enough to get one and not everyone chooses to right away. More than a third of TiMERs don’t begin to count down upon installation regardless of age. TiMERs promise your soulmate, but it is still underscored that one needs to be patient.

But the numbers don’t lie. Yes, her moms were right when they told her that more than a third—39% to be exact—of TiMERs don’t begin to count down right away. But 87% of TiMERs begin to count down by the time one turns eighteen, and 74% of all soulmates have reached each other before turning twenty-five.

Nini’s twenty years old, and her TiMER is still blank. She wakes up to _––d ––h ––m ––s_ on her wrist each morning, and since installation, the plastic strip on her wrist hasn’t uttered a single sound.

With TiMERs, you’ve already found your soulmate, or you’re on the journey to finding them, or you need to start that journey to them now, like _right now_ , and she just thought she would be on her way given the data. Instead, she continues along with no timeline, no clue that her soulmate is even out there.

In a world where everyone talks about soulmates as a given and a guarantee, it’s difficult not to feel like a boat that hasn’t been docked to shore, left adrift in an expanse of the sea or like a balloon that’s slipped out of one’s grasp, floating up, up, and away. And she has certainly gone through anger, misery, confusion, and constant loneliness over and over again—mostly directed towards her soulmate, whoever it may be that has left her aimless, evidently content to keep her waiting.

She’s managed to keep herself afloat after all these years, riding out these feelings with greater ease over time.

It’s not like Nini needs to meet her soulmate right now—it would just be nice to have any kind of clue that her person was out there waiting to meet her too. TiMERs were supposed to give you that. How could her soulmate possibly not be dying every day like she is, wondering and hoping as to how they will find one another? Or worse—and she doesn’t allow herself to consider this possibility too often, but she can’t help the way that it creeps into her mind on occasion—is there no one out there for her at all?

But regardless, as much as it consumes her, a physical reminder never too far out of her line of sight, she tries not to think about it too much. Her TiMER might not have begun to tick away, but her life is, and she tries her best to continue on.

\---

Pause Café becomes a part of her routine, whether she is swinging through to pick up a coffee as her day gets started or stopping and staying awhile to get work done when she has an extended break between classes. She doesn’t mean to exactly, but she finds herself pulled to the café when she knows that Ricky will be working. She’s picked up that he works Tuesday and Wednesday mornings but Monday and Thursday afternoons while the grumpy girl with the pierced eyebrow is typically there when he is not—except on Fridays, when they both work in the mornings.

He remembers her order, knowing to swap in almond milk for whole, and in the short exchange that it takes for her to pay and for him to make her drink, they talk. After he wears his San Francisco Giants shirt with the hole again, she asks if he’s from the Bay Area, like her, and finds out that he split his time between there and Chicago growing up. When she wears a shirt she got when she saw Cage the Elephant in concert last year, they wind up talking about music, swapping song recommendations, and she learns that it’s usually his playlist that’s playing through the café’s speakers.

And he always decorates her cup with a joke and a drawing. _What did the egg say to the frying pan? You crack me up. Why was the broom late? It over swept._ The jokes are silly, the kind that you’d find on a popsicle stick after you’ve finished the frozen treat and seconds before you toss it entirely, but they make her smile every time.

Kourtney joins her when her eight a.m. poli sci class is canceled one morning. When Ricky sees them enter, his face lights up, and as they take their place in line, he holds up a cup with Nini’s name already written on it, mouthing to her, “I got you.”

Kourtney shoots her a wary look as they step up to the counter.

“Hi,” Nini says brightly. “Ricky, this is my roommate, Kourtney.”

“Hey.”

“Hi. I’ll have an Americano,” Kourtney says, her tone level. Ricky nods, ringing them up together, and Nini catches Kourtney giving Ricky a once over as he does so, her lips pursed.

When Ricky looks back up at them, he points the tip of his Sharpie towards Nini and says, “I like your hair like that.”

Her hand reaches up to carefully touch one of the space buns she’s twisted her hair into on top of her head. “Oh! Thanks.”

When their drinks are ready, Nini thanks him again and waves goodbye over her shoulder, the bell signaling their exit, and Kourtney lets out a long, low whistle as Nini turns her cup in her hands to see the owl wearing glasses that Ricky’s doodled on the side.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Kourtney says. “I didn’t realize that getting coffee also meant witnessing a mating dance, free of charge.”

“ _What_?”

“He was flirting with you,” Kourtney says, slowly, looking nearly as confused as Nini feels. “There’s no way you missed that back there.”

Nini shakes her head, laughing in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”

Kourtney stares at her like she has three heads, as if she’s the one talking nonsense. “That guy, Ricky, is totally into you.” Nini continues to shake her head, and Kourtney takes her iced latte from her hands, turning the cup until she sees Ricky’s daily joke and drawing. “Are you kidding me with this?” She pauses before adding, “I didn’t see a TiMER.”

Nini bites down on her bottom lip before she says, “Yeah. I don’t think he has one.”

After her first day in the café, she made it a point to look the next time, but both of Ricky’s wrists appear to be bare, TiMER-free.

“Then what are you waiting for?” Kourtney asks, but Nini shakes her head, ignoring her question and redirecting the conversation as they walk towards campus.

  
When it comes to Nini and Kourtney, TiMERs both pull them together and apart, especially now that their third roommate, Ashlyn, only has eighty-two days left until meeting her soulmate. They’ve bonded over their imperfect countdowns, but from there, their attitudes diverge. Kourtney’s TiMER isn’t set to time out until she’s thirty-nine, and she’s always been vocal about not seeing why she can’t have fun until then. “Serves my soulmate right for deciding to take so long,” she’s always said, opting for casual flirtations and meaningless flings to pass the wait. She insists that those on the brink of timing out are the best candidates, hoping to live a little before meeting their soulmate. Still, and though Nini knows that her best friend would never admit it, as she refuses to completely sideline herself from romantic pursuits in the interim, she knows it stings Kourtney bitterly to know that she has to wait so long as everyone couples up around them.

Nini’s always been more hesitant about dating, a concept that looks very different than it had when her moms originally met, her mind rolling through her options time and time again. When it comes to someone with a countdown, how can she get close to them knowing that she’s just a placeholder for their soulmate, watching as their TiMER tick, tick, ticks them closer and closer to their true person? She knows that those without TiMERs are her real candidates, and if she wants to speed through the process of elimination, she should work through convincing more people to get one, to see if they are a match. But how can she allow herself to get close to someone when there’s the potential that, after they do get a TiMER, they weren’t a match to begin with? At that point, how can she wipe her hands clean of someone she’s become invested in only to move onto the next?

\---

The first time that she runs into Ricky outside of Pause she literally runs into him, colliding with something solid and warm in the quad, sending the stack of sheet music she’s cradling against her chest flying across the brick pathway.

“I’m so sorry,” she hears as she drops to her knees to try and catch the loose papers.

“It was completely my fault,” she answers when she sees a few pieces of sheet music held out to her, attached to a TiMER-less arm. Her eyes continue up until she locks eyes with Ricky.

“So, you do exist outside of a coffee shop,” he says, his amused tone reflected in his bright eyes. “I was starting to think I made you up.”

Kourtney’s words about Ricky flirting with her ring in her ears, and she lets out a nervous laugh, dragging her eyes away from his to continue her sheet music rescue mission but finding pages of their school newspaper, _The Pendulum_ , instead. She’s not sure if her friend’s even right, but the threat that someone’s interested in her, especially the boy with warm brown-eyed smiles and cartoon doodles of cats wearing hats, terrifies her down to her toes.

“Music major?” he asks as he passes her more pages of sheet music.

“Composition.” She grew up loving books, turning narratives and pretty sentences in her mind over and over, and she grew up loving music, plinking away at the piano and plucking at ukulele strings. So it made sense when she began drawing out notes and stories to craft her own songs; sometimes they were about nothing but sometimes they were about everything: the things she wanted to scream from rooftops or was too scared to say or didn’t even know how to say before putting them to music. When she looks at her blank TiMER, it’s easy to think that her love of making music might be the only thing in her life that’s meant to be.

She picks up another newspaper, a loose front page, and holds it out to him. “I’m guessing you are. . . a hamster owner or journalism major?”

He has smudges of ink on his fingers when he accepts the page from her. “Can’t I be both?”

She smiles despite herself and ducks her head down to focus on neatly organizing her collected papers.

“My roommates are throwing a party this weekend,” Ricky says suddenly, digging through his backpack until he emerges with a pen. He writes something on the top page of the stack of newspapers in his hands and then hands an entire issue to her. In his messy handwriting, he’s written an address and a nine-digit number, his number she assumes, above the feature story. “You should come.”

“Um, yeah, I’ll see if I can make it,” she answers non-committedly, thinking once again of Kourtney’s comments and begins to edge around him, heading in the direction of her next class, and he does the same.

“Saturday,” he calls back to her, and she gives him a thumbs up as if she hasn’t already decided that there’s no way that she’s going to that party.

\---

She forgets about the newspaper, the party, and the boy until Ashlyn finds evidence of all three abandoned on the kitchen counter. “What is this?” her roommate asks, and Nini turns in her seat on the couch, eyes widening when she sees what’s in the girl’s hand.

“Nothing,” she says quickly, climbing over the back of the couch to reach her faster.

“What do you mean?” Kourtney asks from where she’s seated at the kitchen table.

Ashlyn turns the copy of _The Pendulum_ around to display the phone number and address written across the top.

“Just some party that this guy invited me to,” Nini says, doing her best to keep her tone breezy, as she snatches the newspaper out of Ashlyn’s hands.

Kourtney raises an eyebrow. “This guy wouldn’t be Pause Guy, would he?”

Nini shrugs, drawing her shoulders inward, and Ashlyn rips the newspaper back out of her hands, whacking her with it.

“You didn’t tell me there was a guy.”

“There is no guy,” Nini swears.

Kourtney scoffs. “Oh, there’s a guy. A TiMER-less guy.” With a gasp, Ashlyn hits her lightly in the shoulder with the newspaper once more.

“There’s not a guy,” Nini repeats and adds, “And I’m not going to the party.”

“Oh, you are going to that party,” Kourtney says, a glint in her eye. “And we’re coming with you.”

\---

Ricky lives in a house off-campus with a wrap-around front porch and a welcome mat that says WELCOME YOU ARE in Star Wars block lettering. She can hear the music, some remixed-to-death pop song that she knows all the words to without even meaning to, before they even go inside. The entranceway opens up to the living room and beyond that there’s a game of flip cup in progress. Kourtney and Ashlyn, as they’d insisted, came with her, and she’s grateful for that now that she doesn’t recognize a single other person at this party.

“Where’s this guy?” Ashlyn asks, poking her in the back.

She almost responds that there is no guy on instinct but catches herself, given that she’s definitively past the point of convincing them of that by now. “I’m not sure,” she answers instead, scanning the room for a distinct head of curly hair until she feels another poke from Ashlyn.

“Boy spotted.”

Or more accurately, Ricky spots her first by the way that he’s smiling right at her and says something to the red-haired boy beside him before beginning to make his way over to them.

“You came,” he says once he reaches her, and she picks up on the hint of surprise in his otherwise casual tone.

“Yeah, I hope it’s okay that I brought my friends—” She glances over her shoulder to where Kourtney and Ashlyn had been standing only moments before to see that they have disappeared. “Who are now nowhere to be found,” she finishes with a tight-lipped smile. She makes a mental note to kill them later.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks, and she says yes, following him into the kitchen which has been blocked off to the rest of the party and accepts the plastic cup that he hands her. The drink tastes exactly what she figures a group of college boys would make when left to their own devices—a mix of lemonade, Sprite and way too much vodka—and she chokes down the large gulp that she takes.

It’s a fraction quieter in the kitchen but not by much when a Diplo song starts up, but it doesn’t deter Ricky from deciding to make the most meaningless small talk in the empty kitchen of his own party. He leans in close to ask her about her day (which was fine) and her roommates (who she met freshmen year during orientation, becoming fast friends and sticking to each other ever since). She answers each of his questions, unsure of where he’s going with this because this isn’t the usual route most college boys elect when angling for an alcohol-fueled hookup.

While she normally would sidestep any situation of the sort, she finds herself not moving away, unable to help herself, unfortunately curious to find out what he’s going to do. Maybe it’s because of how she’s avoided something or someone like him for so long, utilizing the years of overwhelming aching for any sign from her soulmate to build up the protective barrier she’s solidified around herself. Ricky is exactly the kind of person to ruin all that. He’s cute. He has good taste in music, and he writes messages on her coffee cup for an order that he’s memorized. Despite deep down knowing better, those seem like good enough reasons in this moment to listen to him monologue about the rainy week they’re supposed to have for five minutes straight.

Finally, she feels their hands brush, his index finger curling around hers, and her heart stop-starts in her chest at this small touch, which seems like a bit of an overdramatic response that she knows her brain should chide her body for. But then she shivers at his voice, too, low in her ear when he says, “You look really good tonight.”

She hopes that she would after all the time Kourtney spent on her makeup and the six different outfits that Ashlyn made her try on before deeming this one acceptable, but she takes a deep inhale through her nose, eyeing the boy next to her carefully before asking, measured, “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t even falter when he tells her, “I’m trying very hard to get you to like me.”

She lets out a noise, part-nervous laugh, part-disbelieving huff, and looks away from him, doing her best to settle the way her heart is rattling around in her chest. “You don’t even know me,” she finally says.

Keeping his gaze steady, she feels his fingers tighten around hers, and he tells her, “But I want to.”

Her heart continues to beat out of rhythm, and any curiosity she has slips away quickly in favor of the anxiety pricking at the back of her mind. She shakes her head and requires herself to take a single step backwards, removing her hand from his. “No. This—” She gestures between the two of them. “No. I don’t do this. Not when I have this.” She holds up her wrist, displaying her blank TiMER that blinks _––d ––h ––m ––s_ , though she assumes that he’s seen it by now. Bitterly, she thinks that must be part of her appeal to someone without a TiMER; both of them a rare breed of untethered, and presumably her TiMER, which reveals both her desire to find her soulmate and her soulmate’s own indifference in finding her, contributes to a perception of how lonely and desperate she must appear.

“Ah,” he says, pressing his lips into a thin line. “So, you’re the kind of person that lets their TiMER dictate not only their future but what they choose to do with their present. Got it.”

His words are biting, both in his tone and their unexpected accuracy, but she narrows her eyes, leaning into anger instead of hurt. “Right,” she snaps back. “No need to get to know me, because clearly you have me all figured out. Goodnight, Ricky.”

“Wait.” When she turns to leave the kitchen, he catches onto her wrist, and she’s not sure whether or not it’s on purpose when his thumb brushes over her TiMER, but she clenches her jaw to keep from shivering at his touch again. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just. . . I just think I could make your present a little more exciting.”

His words don’t even come across as flirtatious, only deeply sincere, and somehow, that’s worse.

She jerks her hand from his grasp and before leaving him behind in the dark kitchen, repeats firmly, “Goodnight, Ricky.”

\---

**_When will you find the one? Let the countdown begin._ **

Even before she got her TiMER, she had dreams about her soulmate. They never had a face; sometimes they weren’t even more than a voice and never one she recognized.

Initially, the dreams led up to the moment in which they finally met, a drumroll leading into the precipice of _the_ moment in which eyes meet, their TiMERs going off together—until Nini realized that what she thought was her TiMER was actually her alarm clock startling her awake.

As the years went on, however, the dreams morphed into something new entirely: confrontations with her soulmate, asking—no, demanding—to know what took them so long, teary-eyed meetings where she promised over and over that she didn’t care how many years it took them to find her as long as they were here now. But one thing always stayed the same. Her soulmate was shapeless, voiceless, unidentifiable in any way.

Nowadays, her subconscious knows better than to dream about her soulmate at all.

\---

Seb and Carlos are a textbook TiMER case study. Finding your soulmate early on in college is common due to the hundreds of new people you are now able to encounter. They met on their dorm floor on move-in day, both heading to the communal bathroom with shower caddies in hand when they locked eyes, TiMERs chiming.

But, and the case studies don’t get into the nitty gritty details of this, it wasn’t a seamless relationship immediately. A soulmate is the guarantee—how a pairing continues beyond that point varies, whether it be friends to lovers, opposites attract, meet cute, enemies to lovers. Carlos had been out to his family since high school, had anticipated his match would be a boy, whereas Seb, from rural Utah, had carried around his sexuality as a secret his entire life and was now being forced to acknowledge it with his traditionally conservative family and friends back home. Two years later, while it hadn’t been an easy story, it was their story, and Nini thinks it caused them to love one another even more deeply, even more fiercely today.

Alongside Kourtney and Ashlyn, Seb, and thus Carlos, are some of her closest friends, having bonded over Sondheim the first day in their introductory music theory course. Seb’s in the music program as well but as a performance major for piano, allowing them to weave in and out of one another’s classes. This fall, they both signed up for the same composition course, knowing that they could pair up for the end of semester showcase with Nini as composer and Seb as performer, a perfect complement.

“We could play off a Chopin motif,” Seb suggests as they walk through the student union after class.

She nods. “And turn it contemporary like Philip Glass.”

“Nini,” she hears someone call after her, and both Seb and she stall, turning to see who said her name. Seb sees him first, nudging her in the side, and she follows his line of sight to see Ricky jogging towards her, his backpack hanging off one shoulder and thumping against his side with every step.

She hasn’t seen him since Saturday, carefully sidestepping Pause Café over the last week, and otherwise, it’s not too difficult to avoid him on campus given their natural orbits kept them apart for the last two years all on their own. She’d really like to keep it that way, and she moves to tug Seb along, but he doesn’t move when Ricky calls out her name again.  
  


“Who is—”

“Hey,” Ricky pants, skidding to a stop in front of them. He heaves out another breath and looks hesitantly from Nini to Seb and back again. “Can we talk?”

Seb, the only person she knows to avidly avoid conflict more than herself, immediately goes to excuse himself despite the panicked, insistent look that she gives him. He pats her gently on the arm. “I’ll see you at lunch?”

And then he’s gone, leaving Nini across from Ricky, and since she no longer has a choice, she shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

Ricky drags a hand through his hair, and his fidgeting would give away his nervousness if he weren’t already giving her big, mournful eyes. “I wanted to say that I’m sorry for this weekend.” He pauses and she crosses her arms over her chest, signaling for him to continue. “I shouldn’t have said what I said about your TiMER. It wasn’t fair of me, because you were right, I don’t know you.” She swallows thickly, and when he sees her moment of hesitation, he continues, “But I meant what I said, too. I’d like to get to know you better. As friends.”

Friends. Arms still folded over her chest, she considers Ricky and the nervous, hopeful energy that permeates from him, and who knows if she will end up regretting this later, but for now, she nods. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” she exhales, letting her arms drop and a hint of a smile curves her lips upwards. “I mean, you _do_ have access to the coffee, so. . .”

He laughs a little at that, readjusting his backpack strap on his shoulder. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.” He doesn’t move from his spot, so neither does she until he checks his phone, telling her, “I have to go to class. But I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah,” she agrees again, and he nods, hopefulness completely masking any previous sign of nervousness, and he begins to backtrack down the hall he ran through, still looking at her, not turning his back until he has to turn the corner and disappear out of view.

\---

Despite saying that she will see Ricky around, she doesn’t go to Pause Café the next day. Or the day after that. Or the one after that. And the dumbest part is that, because she’s agreed to being friends, she feels guilty about avoiding Ricky as if she’s not the one actively choosing to do so.

On Thursday night, however, she’s working on a paper for her Composition for the Screen class that’s due tomorrow—or she’s trying to work on it. Ashlyn invited her LARPing group over to watch the new Alexander the Great biopic on HBO, and she can hear them getting into a debate over the merits of elves versus goblins even with her bedroom door closed. Separately, Kourtney is sewing in her room, the machine chirping loudly through their shared wall, and when Nini has been unable to focus on finishing her first supporting paragraph after half an hour, she throws her laptop and notebook into her backpack and finds that her feet carry her to Pause.

There’s a study group huddled in a corner, quizzing each other with flashcards, but otherwise, it seems quiet, so she pushes the door open. When the bell indicates her entrance, Ricky looks up from his spot behind the counter, and his features ease in recognition. “Hey.”

She steps up to the counter. “Hi.”

He’s already writing on a cup with a Sharpie when he says, “You usually don’t come here this late in the day.”

She shrugs, both hands gripping the straps of the backpack she wears. “I have a paper due tomorrow, and a dozen Medieval enthusiasts and a loud sewing machine in my apartment. Is it okay if I hang out?”

“Of course. I can bring you your drink.”

She thanks him and takes one of the empty tables, opening her laptop and spreading out her notebook, picking up where she left off in her analysis of Amélie’s original score and how it contributes to the film’s tone and wider stylistic choices.

“Here you go,” she hears Ricky say, setting down her drink.

On the side, he’s written, _What do you call a nervous dinosaur? Tyrannosaurus Wreck_ , alongside a tiny T-Rex that appears to be sweating with eyes as wide as saucers. She smiles at the cup and then up at him. “Thank you.”

He gives her a small smile in return and heads back to the counter, allowing her to continue working through her paragraph on the use of the accordion to aid in the film’s whimsical depiction of Paris. She’s nearly reached the conclusion of her essay when Ricky approaches her again.

“I just wanted to double check if you need anything else? I’m about to go on break.” He leans in a little to whisper conspiratorially, “I’m the nice employee, I promise.”

“I’m alright, thanks,” she answers, then before she knows why she’s offering, she gestures to the empty chair across from her. “You’re more than welcome to sit if you want?”

He blinks, surprised by her offer, but nods, pulling out the chair to sit down. “What are you working on?”

She tells him about her Composition for the Screen class, which she genuinely loves. She never thought about writing music specifically for film, but whether it be contained to an artist’s album, a musical or a film score, she’s always loved how music is able to tell a story, carrying a listener through a complete emotional arc. Music in movies differ somewhat, of course, serving more so as a complement to the other storytelling elements, laying over the visual moment as opposed to existing on its own, and in some ways, making it even more difficult for the musician to encapsulate the scene accurately. “I don’t know if that makes any sense,” she finishes lamely when she sees Ricky’s amused expression, sure that she lost him somewhere along the way in her rambling. She’s not even sure if she’s been following herself.

“No, it does,” he answers easily. “Obviously, music in general is a way to tell stories, but what that looks like is adapted to the medium it’s showcased through—therefore makes sense that you would have a class all about this different way music can be used.”

She nods slowly at the much better and more succinct way he’s expressed her sentiment. “Exactly.” She looks down at her drink which is mostly melting ice at the bottom of her cup by now and looks back up at Ricky across from her. “So, you write for _The Pendulum_?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “My own form of storytelling, I guess?” He tells her about his dad working in advertising as a copywriter and how he thought he might major in that once he got to college, signing up for the introductory classes in the communications school and ending up preferring the journalism track instead. “But at least I know I can always fall back on barista if needed,” he jokes, and she rolls her eyes good-naturedly.

She watches as he bites down on his bottom lip, waiting for him to work through whatever is on the tip of his tongue, until he says, “I’m glad you felt like you didn’t have to keep avoiding me.”

She opens her mouth to protest but stops herself upon his soft, sincere expression, the same stupid guilt she’s felt the last few days creeping back. She tries to squash it away, because she’s here now, isn’t she? “Hey, I don’t _just_ drink coffee. Tiger Sugar? So good.”

“I don’t know what that is,” he says.

She tilts her head. “Boba tea?” He shakes his head, and her mouth falls open. “Come on, you’ve never had it?”

He lifts his shoulders in a shrug, and hope shines in his eyes when he says, “I guess you’ll have to take me some time?”

And since they’re supposed to be friends, since she thinks she actually does want to be friends with him, she says, “Okay. Are you free on Monday?”

\---

As it turns out, easing into a friendship with Ricky, bypassing the initial misstep, is easier than she anticipates. They’ve covered the basics as is, having established an easy back and forth in the weeks since she’s been going to Pause, and now this extends beyond the time it takes an espresso machine to produce her latte. She takes him to her favorite place for bubble tea where he marvels at the stripes of brown sugar syrup streaking down the sides of his cup, which turns into studying side by side at Pause when he’s off of his shift every Thursday. From there, they agree to meet up for lunch in between classes on Wednesdays where one afternoon, he discovers that she’s never seen any of the Star Wars movies, insisting that she has to come over and watch them all, like, yesterday.

So she returns to his house on a new Saturday night, wiping her feet on the doormat that still proclaims that welcome she is, and this time the only other people there are his roommates and best friends, who are yelling at the TV screen and each other as they race down Rainbow Road.

“That’s Big Red—” Ricky points to the red-haired boy who jabs at his controller hard with his thumbs. “And that’s E.J. and our friend from high school, Gina.” E.J. screams as his Luigi veers off the track once more, and Gina’s sitting on the floor, stretching and touching her chest to her knees, wrapping her fingers around her toes. “Everybody, this is Nini.”

They don’t even tear their eyes away from Mario Kart when they chorus their greetings together, and Ricky continues, “I guess if you guys are using the TV, we’re going to watch Episode IV in my room.”

Immediately, E.J. flips the game off, going to pull up A New Hope, and Big Red whips his head around to finally look at her with wide eyes. “Wait—you’re the girl whose never seen Star Wars?”

She spares Ricky a glance. “Maybe?”

Big Red shakes his head then pats the place beside him on the couch. “Oh, boy, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

They only get through the first two movies in the original trilogy that night before Nini starts to get sleepy, and Ricky insists on holding off on watching any more, telling her that she needs to be at peak concentration for these films. That night, she decides that she likes his friends, the way that they swap lighthearted jabs at one another, inside jokes woven into every interaction. Gina nudges her foot, warning the boys not to scare Nini away when Big Red and E.J. start up a burping contest, because she’s so tired of being stuck with their sorry asses all the time.

“Seriously, they’ve run off every female friend I’ve ever invited over,” Gina whispers loudly, ensuring that the guys hear her.

“Hey,” Ricky exclaims. “I’m the one who brought her here.”

“And we’re all trying not to question that miracle too much, okay?”

She meets a few of the other staff writers for _The Pendulum_ , too, when Ricky tells her to meet him in the newsroom before they get dinner with Gina and Big Red one night. Ricky’s the news editor this year, which she learns positions him nicely to get the editor-in-chief slot their senior year, and she believes that, now that she always sees he has a front page byline when she picks up the latest issue every Tuesday. Journalism isn’t about the lyrical prose or beautiful language that she gravitates towards in song writing, but she can still recognize how he’s able to turn the stories that he covers, picking out more details and nuance than she would have picked up on. When she stops by the newsroom for the first time, she also discovers that his editorial status means he has a desk with a wooden placard with his name on it.

“This is _so cute_ ,” she insists, brandishing the name plate to him like he hasn’t seen it a thousand times, and he shakes his head before dragging her out of the room.

When they aren’t making time and space to see another, she finds herself in constant contact with him anyway. He texts her random observations throughout his day, a picture of a sausage dog he saw riding on a skateboard down his street or his detailed critique of why classes shouldn’t be allowed to be held before ten a.m., and she finds herself sharing with him equally, sending him a piano arrangement that she thinks he might like or convincing him to start watching New Girl, agreeing to receive his thoughts in real time over text once he does so.

She doesn’t introduce him to Kourtney and Ashlyn, hesitant to do so knowing that they won’t let her hear the end of it that she’s becoming friends with Ricky—especially after she told them about their conversation at his party, in which Kourtney rolled her eyes, not at him but at her, not even bothering to resurface their past argument on Nini’s stunted dating life. And that’s exactly what introducing the two would do. Kourtney would encourage her to pursue an emotionally detached relationship she’s not equipped to handle. Besides, that’s so not what she wants with Ricky, and, by the way that they’ve easily become strictly friends these last weeks, she knows that it’s not what he wants either.

So, he doesn’t meet Kourtney and Ashlyn, but he does meet Seb.

Seb and Nini are working side-by-side in a practice room for the semester showcase piece, and while technically Nini is the composer, she respects Seb’s taste and artistry and truly wants to create a composition that reflects them both. They’ve finished another meter as their hour block reservation on the practice room comes to a close, and there’s a soft knock on the door. It’s Ricky, and she waves him into the room, and he enters with two coffees and a muffin in hand.

“Hi,” she greets him brightly, not getting up from her spot at the piano then points to the drinks he’s carrying. “Is one of those for me?”

“No, I’m trying to make progress on my goal of having a caffeine-induced heart attack by thirty-five.”

She rolls her eyes but accepts the coffee that he hands her before gesturing to Seb. “Seb, this is Ricky, Ricky, Seb,” she introduces them quickly before taking a long sip of coffee.

Ricky waves, and Seb coos, “Oh, Ricky, nice to meet you—I’ve heard so much about you!”

Ricky gives Nini a look. “Good things I hope?”

Seb nods on her behalf, albeit a little more enthusiastically than she’d like, and Nini takes this as a good time to climb off the piano bench. “Are you ready to go?” she asks Ricky, and he agrees, letting her lead the way out of the practice room after she and Seb have exchanged goodbyes.

They’ve only made it a few steps out of the music building when Ricky asks teasingly, “So, what kind of good things?”

She shoves him in the shoulder, catching him off balance, and she’s grateful that he’s too busy tripping over the pathway to catch the blush rising in her cheeks.

\---

She’s at Ricky’s house again as they near their completion of the prequel trilogy and thus the original six films, when they break between Episode II and III to refill on snacks. Nini offers to help Gina make more popcorn, joining her in the kitchen.

Having now settled into a friendship with him, she doesn’t think about Ricky’s initial interest in her often, because since then, he’s truly never indicated that he sees her in that way. Their friendship doesn’t entail lingering touches or lovelorn eye contact. But as she stands in the very spot of their fight, she can’t help it when her mind goes there.

“You have a TiMER,” she comments suddenly, already having seen it on Gina’s left hand the last time she came over.

Gina stills, the popcorn bowl in hand. “Yeah, I do,” she says, turning to her. “You do, too, right?”

Nini holds out her wrist, displaying _––d ––h ––m ––s_ , and says flatly, “Blank.”

“Oh,” Gina says, hushed. Nini’s used to reactions like this, as if she’s just announced that someone close to her has recently died, receiving sad smiles and sympathetic head tilts.

“Big Red and Ricky. . .” She pauses, twisting her fingers together. “They don’t have one.”

Gina turns to dump the freshly popped popcorn into the bowl, her back to Nini when she answers, “No, they don’t.”

“Do you know why?”

Gina remains quiet for a long moment before she says, “Well, I think Big Red does whatever Ricky does.”

“And Ricky?”

When she turns to face her, Gina’s face is scrunched up, eyebrows furrowed as if she’s trying to work through a complicated math equation that has more variables than constants. “He doesn’t really talk about it,” she finally says, keeping her voice low so the boys in the next room over don’t hear her. “But TiMERs didn’t work out very well for his parents.”

Nini nods in understanding. Most people their age with divorced parents came to be that way when they elected to get later-in-life TiMERs together, discovering they were mismatched soulmates all along.

“He’s a really good guy, though. One of the best,” Gina adds. Nini’s starting to get that all on her own, but she finds herself nodding once more. “So, don’t be too hard on him for taking so long,” she says.

Nini tilts her head, puzzled. Ricky’s usually late—to plans, lunches, movies—and sure, it’s annoying especially when she’s such a stickler for punctuality, but he’s at least picked up the habit of texting her when he’s running late, which happens to be always. Still, she appreciates the gesture. But the earnestness Gina wears makes her think that the other girl isn’t talking about Ricky being late to coffee.

“Did one of you fall down the drain?” E.J. yells from the living room, and Gina rolls her eyes, heading back with popcorn in hand, Nini trailing behind.

\---

When he has the closing shifts at Pause, she finds herself staying late until she’s the last one there, her coffee long gone, and she doesn’t fight it when he pesters her into helping him clean up. She sweeps circles around him anyway.

“Do you think we just missed each other before this year?” she asks, emptying the dust pan into the trash. “Like, if we were ever at the same party or passed each other on the quad and never realized?”

Ricky shakes his head. “No,” he replies. “I would have remembered you.”

She rolls her eyes. “No, you wouldn’t have. It’s not that small of a school.”

“No, I mean it,” he insists. “Don’t you ever meet someone and boom, you know that you’re going to keep them around?”

She thinks of meeting Kourtney and Ashlyn as lost, wide-eyed freshmen on the first day of orientation and discussing the best songs of Company within minutes of meeting Seb, and she might have an idea of what he’s talking about. She thinks of meeting Ricky, his rumpled appearance and her, caffeine deprived, and jokes about fancy fish. Or maybe she completely knows what he’s talking about.

\---

Ricky’s made it to season two of New Girl, which is Nini’s favorite season, so she comes over to watch, sitting cross-legged on his bed while he works on a paper for his media law class next to her.

“Nick and Jess are the best. Definitely soulmates,” she announces as the end credits roll on the episode.

Ricky pauses, his fingers hovering over his laptop keyboard. “You really believe in that stuff, huh?”

His words dig into her in their dismissal, and a flash of defensiveness washes over her. “ _That stuff_ being soulmates?” she asks. “Of course, I do. It’s. . . soulmates, not like, Santa Claus or ghosts.”

“I mean, yeah, we know ghosts are real,” he answers pointedly, his eyes not leaving his computer screen.

She recalls what Gina said about his parents and their own ill-fated TiMERs, and she chooses her next words carefully. “Is that why you don’t have a TiMER?”

Finally, he looks over at her, his features set in neutrality. “Partially, yeah. I’m sure it could match me with _someone_ , but do I think that person is immediately my magical, perfect soulmate that I should follow to the ends of the Earth?” He shrugs. “Not particularly.”

For an instant, she wants to ask him about what he thinks about the person, his person, that he’s leaving on the other end of the line, knowing that they, like herself, have cycled through anger and sorrow at the thought that their soulmate doesn’t care about them in return. But she feels tears prick at her eyes at the thought of leading the conversation down a road so raw, so exposing for herself, and she pivots.  
  


“I disagree. I think your soulmate is the one person that you knew before you knew anything else, before you were even put on this Earth, and when you were separated, they took a part of you with them. So, now we’re all put here with the intention that we find our person, that other half of who we are and who we’re meant to be, because until you’re reunited, that’s all you are. You’re a half of that whole, and when you do find that piece, everything makes sense—everything that came before, the good and the bad, it will all make sense, because it led you to them and feeling complete once more.” Her chin wobbles as she finishes her rambling, and she clenches her jaw, stamping down the urge to cry as the lump rises in her throat.

Ricky looks at her deeply, not with pity or conceit like she thinks he might but with something almost like compassion. “But wouldn’t you want to find that out on your own, not have it dictated by a piece of plastic? Don’t you want to fall in love and have someone fall in love with you in return?”

Stubbornly, she means it when she says, “I don’t think having a TiMER and falling in love are mutually exclusive. I think I can have both.”

Ricky’s eyes soften, his shoulders easing, and his next words sound like a promise. “I hope you do.”

\---

With her TiMER at forty-one days and counting, Ashlyn informs them that their apartment will be having a girls’ night, complete with personal pints of ice cream and a queue of utterly mindless made-for-Netflix romantic comedies.

Kourtney suspects that she’s panicking, her freedom slipping through her fingers as her soulmate draws near, and while Nini wouldn’t put it _that_ way, she’s inclined to agree overall.

“Do you think your soulmate will be a tall girl?” Nini asks as the protagonist in the movie they’re watching bemoans that wearing size thirteen Nikes— _men’s_ size thirteen Nikes—is the worst fate that can be bestowed upon a person.

Ashlyn whacks her with one of their decorative couch pillows, leaving Nini to dissolve into giggles, when her phone lights up for the sixth time that evening. It’s Ricky, has been Ricky all night, sending her live updates from Pause’s amateur poetry night that he has the misfortune of being on shift for.

“Who keeps texting you?” Kourtney asks, snatching her phone before Nini can reach it, and she watches with a sinking stomach as her friend’s eyes scan her phone. Beyond not just introducing them, she’s actually never confronted her roommates with the concept that she was friends with Ricky. It’s not like she was hiding him exactly. But after she told them about the night at his party and her decision at that time to avoid and avert him, them becoming friends never came up. And maybe that’s due to the fact that she always told them she was going to hang out with Seb or study at the library or meet up with other friends from her program, but really, who is to say?

“Ricky?” Kourtney asks, one eyebrow raised. “As in coffee shop Ricky?”

“Um, yeah,” she mumbles, grabbing her phone back to see that there’s been not just one but two haikus about writer’s block so far— _a little too on the nose, don’t you think?_ he writes.

“Since when are you two friends?”

“I don’t know.” She tries her best to sound noncommittal, focusing her attention on typing out a response back. “We talk occasionally.”

“Your phone has been going off all night,” Ashlyn says, but she doesn’t have the same annoyance-laced tone as Kourtney. Nini looks over and catches the wounded look in Ashlyn’s eyes.

“Has hell frozen over? Are you seeing someone?” Kourtney asks, but it doesn’t match her typical level of excitement when she swears someone’s checking Nini out. There’s a clear note of disapproval in her tone.

Ashlyn chimes in, “A TiMER-less someone? Do you think he could. . . you know?”

The question, _be your soulmate?,_ hangs over them, and she shakes her head, itchy discomfort crawling up her neck like she’s put on a too-tight woolen turtleneck. This is exactly why she didn’t want to bring it up in the first place—the agenda for blanks to hunt down and convert the TiMER-less dominates popular sentiment. “No, we’re not. . . like that, and he’s not—definitely not. . . _that_. He doesn’t even believe in soulmates.”

“What do you mean?” Ashlyn asks.

She gives a teeny, tiny shrug, redirecting her attention to her phone when it alerts her of another text from Ricky, this time a picture where he’s miming punching himself in the face, and she would laugh if her friends weren’t watching her. “We’re just friends.”

She can feel the weight of Kourtney’s eyeroll without seeing it, but she doesn’t want to start this argument, not when this is supposed to be about the three of them sans soulmates. She holds up her phone, allowing them to watch when she turns it off and the screen goes black. “There you go,” she says. “No more texting friends who aren’t in this room.”

To reiterate her point, she throws a piece of popcorn at Ashlyn, and it bounces off her nose, causing her to laugh and retaliate in kind, and any Ricky-infused moment is forgotten.

\---

In Ricky’s room, Nini marks up sheet music with a pencil, brushing away eraser shavings after she changes a half note to a quarter note, while Ricky strums lazily on his guitar, wincing when he hits an out-of-tune chord.

“Are you bored?” he asks her, and she looks up from her place at his desk.

“Not particularly,” she teases, holding up her theory textbook. He’s abandoned his homework nearly an hour ago.

“Do you want a snack?” he asks, ignoring her, and then before she answers, he adds, “You know what I want? Oreos and peanut butter.”

She shrugs. “Never had it.”

He gapes at her as if she’s told him that she’s never had pizza or oxygen. “For real? We need to change that—right now.” He leaps off his bed, leaving his guitar behind, and yanks on her hand, sending her spinning in his desk chair, and she stumbles as he hauls her to her feet.

He drags her to the grocery store, which is quiet on a Tuesday night at nine p.m. in their college town, leading her down the aisles, grabbing a pack of Oreos—"Double Stuf, obviously,” he informs her very seriously—and then is off to find peanut butter.

“Is this a smooth or crunchy peanut butter situation?” she asks as he leads them past the jam and jelly.

He scoffs, reaching for a jar of Jif. “Smooth is the only option ever.”

“Hey,” she says. “I like crunchy peanut butter.”

He eyes her warily beneath the florescent lights. “We’ll unpack that later.” And then he rips open the package of Oreos and begins to twist open the jar of peanut butter.

“Ricky,” she gasps. “We need to pay for those.”

“We will,” he swears. “But I cannot allow this relationship to carry on one second longer until you try the greatest flavor combination to exist on this Earth.”

And with that, he holds out an Oreo to her. She presses her lips together before taking the cookie from him, digging it straight into the peanut butter. She watches him watch her take a bite, trying not to feel too unnerved by the way he keeps his eyes locked on hers, and it’s good. Of course, it’s good, and she shrugs, telling him as much.

“Now can we go check out?” she asks.

Content, he nods and motions for her to lead the way.

\---

“Hey, Nini,” she hears someone say far too loudly given that they’re in a library. Ricky slides into the chair across from her, tipping it to one side from the force before righting himself. “Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?”

She considers the coffee stain on his shirt and the loose curl that’s fallen over his forehead before answering. “The bad news.”

“Huh,” he says, tilting his head to the side. “Would have pegged you as a good news first kind of girl—”

“Ricky? The point?”

“Right,” he says, clasping his hands together. “The bad news is that our arts editor bailed last minute, and now I have to drive to Greenwich tonight in order to cover a show. But the _good news_ is.” He stops and begins to dig through his backpack until he emerges with two tickets in his hand. “I have to drive to Greenwich to cover an Eric Whitacre show, and I thought you might want to come.”

Her mouth falls open. “Are you serious?” Eric Whitacre is one of the most significant modern choral composers, which granted, doesn’t mean much to the average person, she realizes, but in Nini’s life, this is huge—huger than huge. Seb’s going to lose his mind when she tells him.

“Yeah,” he laughs. “I figure I need someone to explain it all to me, right?”

And she does, unable to stop explaining to Ricky the deep impact that Eric Whitacre has had on modern day choral composition, how his virtual choir evolved how people are able to connect and sing together. “’Sleep’ is probably his most famous piece,” she tells him. “And I’m probably going to cry when they perform it.”

And she does, her eyes welling up at the weightless, transcendent acapella piece, and it’s not even that the piece is sad; she cries because of how innately beautiful it is, how it reminds her how much music as an entity moves her. She feels Ricky nudge her, their elbows sharing the arm rest between them.

“Are you okay?” he whispers, and she nods, brushing away one of the tears that’s begun to slide down her cheek.

“It’s just so beautiful, you know?”

He keeps his eyes on hers, his gaze warm, and he exhales, “Yeah, it is.”

After the show, Ricky drops her off at her apartment, getting out of his car to walk her to the door before she can tell him not to.

“Be honest,” she instructs. “What did you think?” They reach her apartment, so she turns to face him, leaning back against the solid doorframe, wanting to hear what he has to say.

“Honestly?” he asks, rubbing the back of his neck, and she nods. “I don’t think it’s going to be added to any of my playlists anytime soon, but I get why you like it. Music like that shows you exactly what a perfect piece of art can be when created by someone so brilliant.”

The corners of her lips turn upwards. She’s willing to accept that answer. “Thanks for asking me to come.”

He shrugs it off like it’s no big deal, like she’s thanking him for not charging her extra for almond milk—which he never does, no matter how many times she tells him to. But he looks at her, his eyes locked on hers, and it feels like a big deal in the way that warmth spreads through her and in the way that he says softly, “There’s no one else I would have asked.”

He’s closer to her than he has been since they were alone together in his kitchen, and she’s not sure exactly how Ricky would look if he wanted to kiss someone, but it might not look too dissimilar to how he’s looking at her right now. And maybe it’s the Whitacre or the way he always smells like bittersweet espresso even when he doesn’t have work that day or the fact that she hasn’t kissed anyone in a very long time, but she thinks she’d let Ricky kiss her if he wanted to.

The thought kind of makes her stop breathing for a second.

“Nini?” She hears Kourtney before she sees her, and on an awful, wimp instinct, she flattens against their front door, briefly considering the states of matter and whether the laws of physics would allow her to disappear into it. Since her last conversation with Kourtney and Ashlyn about Ricky existing in her life in any capacity, she’s purposefully steered the conversation clear of any potential Ricky-adjacent topics, hoping to will away their knowledge of him over time.

Hopes now flying out the window, Kourtney spares Ricky a glance, and if she’s surprised to see him, she covers it well until the next words out of her mouth sound like an accusation. “I tried calling you.”

“Oh, uh—” She fumbles through her bag for her phone, but it dawns on her that, after she turned it off for the concert, she never turned it back on.

“My fault,” Ricky jumps in. “The drive back took longer than we thought it would. I promise I won’t keep her out this late on a school night again.” His grin is bright without a hint of awkwardness, but Kourtney just stares at him blankly.

Nini wants to tell him to leave right now and save himself, and apparently her telepathy is better than she thought because Ricky claps his hands together after a long, silent moment. “Well, I should get home,” he announces. He takes a step in the wrong direction, pauses and pivots quickly, tossing out, “See you tomorrow, Nini,” before he’s going, going, gone.

Kourtney turns to her, sporting an unamused look. “By all means, don’t send him off on my account.”

Nini scoffs but remains glued to where she’s leaning against their front door. It’s kind of the only thing keeping her upright at the moment. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” Kourtney counters. “State the obvious?”

Nini rolls her eyes, but Kourtney ignores her, continuing, “Look—I know we don’t agree on everything when it comes to TiMERs, and that’s fine. But don’t act like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re letting yourself get wound up in this guy who doesn’t believe in TiMERs or soulmates or any of it, and I know you. I know you aren’t even going to try to convince him otherwise. So, I’m sorry if I’m already dreading the inevitable day when this blows up in your face, and we’re the ones left to pick up the pieces.”

Nini’s lips part wordlessly, presumably a normal reaction when you’ve been punched in the stomach. “Wow,” she finally says, stepping away from the door, and she bites down to keep her chin from quivering. “How long have you been sitting on that one?”

Kourtney moves forward, keys in hand, and begins to unlock the door. “I’m just being honest.” She pushes open the door, sparing her a fleeting look before going inside.

Nini lets the door shut before turning back the way she came.

\---

She rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet, the Star Wars welcome mat beneath her, before she knocks on the door.

Ricky opens the door in plaid pajama pants. “Hey,” he says, surprised.

“Hi.”

He has one hand on the doorframe, and he tilts his head to look at her, gripping her car keys tightly in one hand and her once carefully curled hair now hanging limp and flat. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she answers quickly, and when he moves aside, she steps into the entryway. “Well, no. I had a fight with Kourtney.” Concern transforms his features, and she waves a hand, amending herself once more, “It’s stupid.”

“Okay,” he says, dragging out the syllables of the word. “Do you want to talk about it? Or not talk about it?”

That answer is easier. “Definitely not.”

“Got it, can do,” Ricky agrees, and he presses his palms together as they stand across from one another in an extended silence. “Do you want to watch a movie?”

The fifteen minute drive to his house hadn’t brought any clarity as to why exactly she was going to see him or what she was going to do when she got there, but she needed to get away from her own apartment, and a movie sounds fine given that she’s shut down wanting to talk. So she nods and follows him to his room where he puts on some dumb Judd Apatow movie. They sit on his bed, Ricky leaning against his headboard while Nini sits legs crossed and shoulders stiff. Seth Rogan makes two consecutive jokes that neither of them laugh at when she considers leaving and forgetting that she ever came over.

Ricky leans forward, his concern from earlier still evident by the crinkle in his forehead, and asks, “Are you sure that you don’t want to talk about it?”

She looks over at him and how soft and unassuming he looks in his pajamas with his hair sticking up in the back, and really, she doesn’t consider much else before leaning in to kiss him.

His lips are chapped, motionless against hers, and he’s not reaching to touch her, not kissing her back, and at that mortifying realization, Nini pulls back just as quickly as she kissed him, her cheeks burning.

“What are you doing?” he whispers, pained, his eyes screwed shut and his hands still at his sides.

She thinks she might die, but if she had her pick, she’d prefer to be swallowed up by the floor. “I—” She stops, and her voice sounds tiny, pathetic to her own ears, when she repeats the words he’d said to her all those weeks ago, because they are the only explanation for why she’s here, why she’s maybe always found herself drawn to Ricky in the first place. “Trying to make my present a little more exciting.”

He opens his eyes, regarding her carefully, thoughtfully—she doesn’t want to say hopefully. His voice cracks when he says, “Yeah?”

She gives him a small, shame-filled nod, because she’s confident that no one in the history of the world has ever read a situation worse than she just did, and she’s never going to be able to look him in the eye again, starting now, when Ricky surges forward to kiss her. And he _really_ kisses her, pressing his mouth firmly against hers, kissing her earnestly, until she’s no longer flushed with embarrassment but on fire from how she’s being kissed by him, unlike any of the kisses that have come before this one and potentially any of the kisses that will follow it. Her heart beats wildly in her chest, and she feels shaky, frenzied as they scramble to get closer, Ricky looping his arms around her waist, and she slides her hands up to cup his cheeks.

They kiss for minutes or maybe it’s hours, she’s not sure, because when her time is spent like this, she can’t possibly be bothered by the seconds slipping away.


	2. all this time we were waiting on each other

**_Are you tired of sitting around, waiting for love?_ **

The minute she stops, she knows that she has to kiss Ricky again—and it is a _has to_ , not a wants to. And as it turns out, she doesn’t even have to wait very long.

The next day, he ambushes her as she’s exiting the music building, tugging on her elbow to lead them around the side of the building, and he presses her against the brick before their lips meet in an impatient kiss. There’s relief in having his mouth on hers again, her body vibrating as she sighs into the kiss, but it’s not enough; she wants more, more, more Ricky, everywhere, all the time. She curls her fingers into his jacket to yank him closer and earns harder, more insistent kisses as a result. He bites on her bottom lip gently before she opens her mouth against his in broad daylight with no regard for the fact that they’re making out against an academic building, _her_ academic building where one of her teachers could happen upon them at any time.

“This is a bad idea, right?” she whispers against his lips in attempt to clear her mind of the intoxication overloading her brain. She’s unsure if she’s talking more to herself or him, and instead of answering her, he pulls away to trail kisses down her neck. His mouth ghosts over her skin, and she tilts her head back against the brick building, swallowing a gasp when he scrapes his teeth against a sensitive spot below her ear.

“No, it’s a good idea,” he answers, his words mumbled into her skin. “Like buffalo chicken pizza or Reese’s Cups.”

She feels his teeth sink into her skin again followed by another feather-light kiss, her eyelids drifting shut at the sensation, and then his words echo through her mind again. She tugs his head up to make him look at her, his lips swollen and pupils blown in desire, albeit looking a little confused at the sudden stop. “Are you hungry right now or something?”

Realization dawning on him, he rolls his eyes and captures her lips once more, and despite what she said moments earlier, she’s pretty much past the point of pretending like she isn’t eager to keep doing this.

And so they do. They kiss on his break at work, tripping over a mop bucket as they fumble for one another in the dark supply closet, and she’s not sure if she’s high on bleach fumes or the feeling of his mouth on hers. And they kiss in her car, Ricky getting twisted up in his seat belt, and they both jump when she slams her elbow into the car horn when crawling over the center console to settle in his lap. And they kiss in an empty, locked up newsroom, which she wants to tell him is a complete abuse of his power, but he lifts her onto his desk, his hand threaded through her hair, and she wraps her legs around his waist without thinking—which is really becoming a habit of hers all around. Rational thought isn’t something she’s particularly good at when it comes to Ricky. Clearly.

Contrary to what the songs and movies and books that she adores instilled in her at a young age, she learns that wanting to kiss someone can be the beginning and end of something all on its own. It doesn’t have to equate to some deep, unending love for that person. It doesn’t mean that, just because she’d willingly drown in the desire to kiss him again, that she wants to be with Ricky in a _romantic_ sense. It doesn’t mean anything more than wanting to feel alive for once, awakening a part of herself that she’s forced to stay dormant so long because of a blank piece of plastic on her wrist.

And if they don’t make it a big deal, it’s not a big deal, she decides.

She doesn’t share her big deal theory with Ricky, but it’s understood that they share the desire to keep whatever not-big-deal thing they’re doing a secret, evident by the way that Ricky doesn’t kiss her until his bedroom door is shut, E.J. and Big Red solidly on the other side. And as much as she’s dying to dissect every kiss with her best friends, it’s not like Nini’s running off to tell Kourtney. Not when they continue to dance around one another in silence in their apartment, two parallel lines that once moved concurrently but now stretch forward in opposite directions.

And maybe she’s a little sick in the head, but after years of openly displaying her loneliness for everyone to see, Nini likes sneaking around. There’s something that feels right about what she always thought would be so wrong, a feeling of correctness that increases tenfold when she instinctively leans into Ricky’s touch. She likes that no one can ask questions about what they’re doing and that she doesn’t have to answer to any resulting judgements. She likes that there’s a new undercurrent to their public-facing friendship that fizzles just below the surface until they can be alone again.

She likes that they still have a friendship, period, that hasn’t disappeared in all this. He writes _Why don't lobsters share? Because they’re shellfish_ , on the first coffee that she gets at Pause following their kiss outside of the music building, and when he’s working late one night on the next day’s edition of _The Pendulum_ , she drops off dinner for him from the stir fry place on-campus that he likes. They still get lunch together on Wednesdays, still watch movies on his couch surrounded by his roommates, still do homework side by side at Pause until the café closes and she sticks around then, too, trailing after him with the broom.

She’s twenty years old with a blank TiMER, no prospect of a soulmate in sight, and she has a perfectly good boy who is a perfectly great kisser right in front of her, content to make out whenever she wants. So, yeah, it really isn’t a big deal.

\---

Carlos tells her that it’s been a literal lifetime since he’s seen her, and while it’s actually been more like two weeks since they’ve hung out and she meets up with Seb on a weekly basis to work on their showcase composition, she agrees, meeting the couple in the café in the student union.

“What have you been up to?” Carlos presses, handing her a fork and napkin as he sits down. “ _Other_ than your showcase piece because this one—” He nods to Seb beside him. “Hasn’t stopped singing your praises about how it’s coming together.”

“Oh, you know,” she says, waving her fork around casually before stabbing a piece of kale in her salad. “A little of this, a little of that.”

“Such as?”

“Classes, music, the usual,” she answers with a shrug.

“How’s that guy you were seeing—Ricky?” Seb chimes in innocently, and Carlos promptly chokes on a cherry tomato.

“You’re _seeing_ someone?” Carlos spits out, strangled, as a concerned Seb pats his back.

“Not like _seeing_ seeing,” Nini hurries to clarify, shoving her water bottle towards Carlos. “Just like, physical seeing—hanging out.” Carlos coughs weakly one last time, and Nini shoots Seb a look. “Ricky’s fine.”

“Who is this guy?” a recovered Carlos finally asks, looking between the two.

Before Nini can elaborate, there’s a new commotion behind Carlos, and her eyes land on a couple standing six feet apart, wide eyed and mouths agape, as two TiMERs go off concurrently. She’s not the only one staring either as the entire café realizes what’s happening, attention quickly drawn to the soulmate pairing, and someone begins to clap, others eagerly joining in. Carlos twists in his chair to watch, and Seb sighs dreamily, leaning to rest his head on Carlos’s shoulder, as one half of the couple, a girl with long blonde hair, smiles shyly at the boy across from her.

She’s been a witness to more soulmates timing out together than she can count and typically finds herself twisted into knots of loneliness, jealousy, anger—every ugly feeling she harbors towards her TiMER and in turn, her soulmate. But she doesn’t feel the same sharp dig when the pang of longing hits her today, distracted when her phone lights up with a text from Ricky. It’s a picture of Big Red with French fries shoved up his nose, and she’s unable to wipe the smile off her face until Carlos throws a crouton at her forehead to capture her attention again.

\---

“I’m just saying that I think it’s supremely unfair that Yoko Ono is seen as _the_ root of The Beatles’ break up,” she says, following Ricky into his house and closing the door behind her. He slides his backpack off, letting it land in the middle of the entryway with a loud thump. “Especially when there were so many other factors—”

Ricky turns on his heel suddenly, halfway to the living room. “Do you hear that?” he interrupts, holding up a single index finger as if he were trying to gauge a wind speed.

The house is silent, a rarity but definitely the case in this moment.

“It’s quiet?” she answers hesitantly.

“Exactly.” A smile spreads across his face, slow and sweet, and she finds it infectious, a smile of her own gracing her features before he closes the space between them to kiss her. He settles his hands on her waist, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many times they do this. She always responds the same: heat crackles through her body like fire threatening to engulf her entirely; her heartbeat races, picking up speed as it beats off-count. Insistent for more of that very feeling, she presses herself onto her toes to kiss him more firmly, pushing his jacket off his shoulders until it joins his backpack on the floor.

“Your room?” she asks. No one might be home at this very second, but that could change at any moment, and she’s not exactly eager to be caught kissing by his friends. He nods but doesn’t pull away. They end up tripping down the hallway, attempting to continue kissing as they do so with only a modicum of success. The arms of her jacket get knotted together behind her back as she tries to take it off, and he bites down on her lip a little too hard at one point, and when they turn the corner, they knock their foreheads together, both jerking backwards at the sharp contact. Nini takes that as a sign that they need to focus, removing her hands from Ricky, and he opens the door to his room, quietly shutting it once they are both inside.

Ricky scrambles onto his bed, almost vaulting himself over one side, and Nini stifles a laugh before joining him, allowing Ricky to take her hands and pull her into his lap. Even as the weeks pass by, their eagerness hasn’t diminished, kissing urgently and her own frighteningly uncharacteristic desperation, as if this time could be the last time and therefore, she better make it count.

She slips her hands into his hair and tugs, pleased with the tiny groan Ricky gives her, and he removes his lips from hers to kiss down the column of her neck, sending a shiver down her spine. The angle is kind of awkward, though, with Ricky beneath her, and she tugs on his shoulder to reverse their positions. When he starts forward, she moves to lean back against his pillows, but they both misjudge space and distance, and Nini ends up banging her head into the wall behind her. She lets out a yelp, her hand flying to the already tender spot forming at the back of her head.

Ricky freezes, his eyes wide, but before he can ask if she’s alright, Big Red’s voice, muffled but unmistakable, comes through the wall: “Nini, are you okay?”

Later, she’s gathered with Ricky and his housemates at their kitchen table eating pizza straight from the grease-stained box, and pink-cheeked, she learns that she and Ricky hadn’t been as subtle as they thought. It turns out that Gina, E.J., and Big Red had set up a bet after the very first time she’d come over as to when Ricky and Nini would finally jump each other. It’s pretty embarrassing to find out that they’d been so certain of something that she’d been so slow to pick up on herself.

“If it helps, I won,” Big Red informs them cheerfully.

It doesn’t, but Ricky shrugs and says with a sheepish smile, “At least we don’t have to worry about them finding out?”

\---

That weekend, E.J. invites them to a party held by one of his water polo teammates, and Nini sticks by Ricky’s side among the room of mostly strangers. They partner together for beer pong in the kitchen where she’s relieved to find out that he’s just as competitive as she is, and they rule the table together for five straight rounds before becoming tired of the rotating competition that poses no real threat to their winning streak. Besides, Ricky had offered to be her designated driver home, making Nini their designated drinker, and she’s starting to bear the consequences.

When she’s half-drunk, feeling loose and a little weightless, she allows Gina to coax her into dancing, leaving Ricky and Big Red behind on the threadbare couch. The two girls spin to a top 40 song, and Nini throws her arms around Gina’s neck. “I’m so glad that I met you,” she slurs, her words more exuberant than she’s prone to ever being when sober, but she means it. Ricky’s friends are fun, and they make her feel fun. And sometimes, they feel like her friends, too, not just Ricky’s.

“Me, too,” Gina coos, petting Nini’s hair. “You’re the best thing Ricky’s ever given me.”

Nini laughs before getting spun around, not by Gina this time but the boy in question. “Ricky!” she exclaims, not thinking twice before she grabs his face in her hands, kissing him squarely on the mouth. A very small, still logical part of her floaty brain reminds her of her current state of drunkenness, because there’s no way she would have done that in front of strangers otherwise. When she pulls away, she keeps her hands in his, and he looks a little caught off guard but happy with her sudden display of affection.

“It’s time to go home, yeah?” he asks, and her head feels light on her shoulders when she nods.

She bids Gina goodbye, the two girls both insisting that they love the other more, until Nini dopily follows Ricky to his car.

When they get to her apartment building, he walks her to her door to make sure that she gets inside okay, but when she finally unlocks the door after fumbling with her keys for a moment too long, she doesn’t drop his hand, tugging on it so that he’ll come inside.

He raises an eyebrow at her warily, silently trying to gauge if she’s aware of what she’s doing.

In the last few weeks, he’s never pressed about being let in further with her friends, her apartment, or really her life despite how openly he’s brought her into his. She knows it’s not really fair, but it’s easier this way. She knows her friends, even Carlos and Seb, will freak out that long-suffering Nini with her blank TiMER is happily hooking up with someone, no strings attached. She knows that they don’t believe she’s equipped to handle it—Kourtney’s proven that. And speaking of, she hasn’t told Ricky that her fight with Kourtney stretches on—never having told him any details and definitely not telling him that it’s technically partially about him. And she’s thankful that he’s never pushed on this either, seemingly understanding that it’s a touchy subject.

But his hesitance now shows that he’s aware of the barrier she’s maintained and that he’s seemingly nervous that she either doesn’t know what she’s doing now or will regret letting him into her world, even if just fractionally, after the fact.

But she does know what she’s doing. Or at least she’s mostly sure, her usual certainty in decision-making currently bouncing around like a game of beer pong in her head. She knows that she wants to keep hanging out with Ricky, and she also knows that he’s becoming her favorite person to be not alone with.

She tugs on his hand once more, and this time, Ricky follows her inside.

When they get to her room, she flips the lights on without realizing just how bright they’ll be. She squints, her eyes adjusting. Are they always this bright, or did her room relocate to the surface of the sun while she was gone? She turns the lights back off. She kicks off her shoes, sending one flying off into a corner of her room while the other ends up under her desk, and then she hops onto her bed, bouncing a little on the edge of her mattress as she does so.

Ricky stands in the corner, toeing off his shoes and lining them up neatly by the door. He looks around her room, and she tries to imagine what he sees: the stand keyboard in one corner, the shelf of books organized in rainbow order, her fluffy white comforter and pile of pillows, the large map of Manhattan that she has framed on her wall, the polaroids of her friends and family that he’s never met pinned on the string lights hanging above her bed.

When he doesn’t step away from the door, she pouts and reaches, palms out, towards him. “You’re so far away.”

Amused, he does as she says, coming closer. “I like your room,” he says, peering down at her.

She scoots backwards to the other side of her bed to give him room to sit down, and her insobriety allows her to say without a hint of embarrassment, “I like you in my room.”

He laughs and sits beside her, and she frowns; he’s still not as close as she would like him to be. The dim light from the moon and nearby streetlamp streaming into her room allows her to make out his features just barely from his soft curls to the curve of the small smile he’s giving her. She eliminates the space between them all on her own, pushing her hands through his hair before kissing him softly. It’s a short, simple kiss, but she finds herself buzzing regardless, electricity running through circuits in her limbs. Maybe it’s from alcohol in part, but she’s positive that Ricky is a contributing factor.

She sits back on her heels, playing with his fingers in her hands. She likes his hands. She likes his long fingers, calloused from playing guitar, and the expanse of his palms when they cup her cheek or line up with her own, and she likes that they’re often stained with newspaper ink, and she likes when he uses them to write messages just for her on the side of her coffee cup. “Don’t leave yet,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I won’t.” To show that he’s true to his word, he leans backwards, sitting up against her pillows. She likes him in her room generally speaking, but she likes him right here beside her even more. She wishes she could take a picture of him just like this, frame it, and carry it close to her chest.

“I like kissing you so much,” she admits quietly, missing his mouth when she leans forward for another kiss, and his hands come up to cradle her face, keeping her close. She wraps her fingers around his wrists that bracket her cheeks, and she brushes her thumb back and forth across the underside of his right wrist. It’s where his TiMER would be, should be, and the corners of her lips turn downward at the smooth, bare skin, warm under the pad of her thumb. Her mind being muddled and easily distracted means that her next words slip out the minute that they run through her mind. “It doesn’t feel like this with other people.”

He parts his lips wordlessly, and she wants to kiss them, but it seems like he wants to say something to her, so she refrains, waiting. She waits one second and then another, and then she flops back onto her pillows, too tired to wait any longer when sleep sounds so nice.

She thinks she might be asleep and assumes Ricky is as well when she hears him say very quietly, “It’s different with you.” She turns her head sideways to find him looking back at her, and he doesn’t look sad or mad or glad or anything, only like he’s stating a simple truth he himself has just realized.

\---

That night, she dreams about her soulmate for the first time in a long time.

They remain featureless, a blurred-out form before her, and they don’t even speak. She assumes that they’ve just timed out together given that they’ve met, but instead of speaking to one another, she’s given a blank piece of sheet music, lacking any notes or time signatures.

On the paper, someone with messy handwriting has written in Sharpie, _What is at the beginning of the end, the start of eternity and at the end of time and space?_

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she tells her soulmate, and when she receives no answer, she says louder, more insistently, “What is this supposed to mean?”

\---

She wakes up with dry mouth, a dull throbbing headache, and a boy in her bed.

She’s never had a boy in her bed. The boy is Ricky, obviously, from what she remembers from last night—his staying at her insistence and both falling asleep within minutes on opposite sides of her bed. She’s sure that her eye makeup is smeared across her pillow, and she never even changed out of what she wore to the party. But unlike when they fell asleep, Ricky is now entirely in her space, warm and imposing: his face pressed into her neck, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist, his slow, even breathing tickling her ear. Her arms are stretched out in front of her, her TiMER blinking back _––d ––h ––m ––s_.

Careful not to wake him, she attempts to peel Ricky off of her by unwinding his arms from around her waist, trying to ease her body away. But she feels him shift beside her, and she freezes, holding her breath as if by doing so, she can will him back to sleep. He mumbles something incomprehensible in her ear though, as he wakes up, and she knows the exact moment that he realizes that he’s spooning her by the way that he quickly retracts his arms.

“Sorry,” he whispers, his voice still thick with sleep.

Shifting to face him now that they’ve put a few inches between their bodies, she wants to tell him that it’s no big deal even though it’s kind of a big deal for her to have a boy, any boy, in her bed, but the words get stuck in her throat at the sight of his soft, drowsy eyes and pillow-dented curls. He looks helplessly cute.

One of their phones begins to ring, and groaning, Ricky rolls off the bed to find his, wincing when he sees the screen, and he answers. “Hey, Big Red—no, I’m fine. Sorry for missing all of your calls. I just. . .” He trails off, chancing a glance at Nini. “She’s fine, too, and we—yeah, I did. _No_ , we. . . no. I’ll be home soon, okay?”

He ends the call and tells her, “He tried to call me like, twelve times last night.” He moves to where he’s left his shoes by the door and begins to put them on, kneeling to tie up the laces. “I should probably get going.”

Nini sits up on her elbows. “Right, totally.” She’s supposed to meet Seb today to work on their composition, and since she doesn’t hear any voices in the living room, it’s probably the time to get Ricky out of here before her roommates get up. She swings her legs over the side of her bed and offers to walk him out.

They make it two steps out of her room when the front door of her apartment opens, Kourtney and Ashlyn entering as they giggle over something, bagels and coffee in hand. Nini pauses, Ricky bumping into her as he follows behind, and his hands come up to her shoulders to right himself. Upon seeing them, Ashlyn pales, eyes going wide, while stony indifference takes over Kourtney’s features before she looks away pointedly.

“Anyway,” Kourtney says a little too loudly and continues to the kitchen.

Nini looks up at Ricky over her shoulder, no explanation for him to be found, but he gives her a small, hesitant smile before they continue. He takes a step out the door, Nini holding it partially open for him, when he turns back to ask, his voice hopeful, “See you later?”

She can feel her roommates’ eyes burning into the back of her head, and she knows that they are watching the exchange even if they can’t hear them from the kitchen. When she doesn’t answer, she sees Ricky’s gaze shift to her lips, and she refuses to allow herself to look at his mouth in return. Before he can get any ideas, she squeaks, “Bye!” and shuts the door in his face.

\---

She’s in a practice room, not hiding per say, but well, she doesn’t expect anyone to find her here until she’s set to meet Seb later that afternoon to work on their semester piece.

It’s both inevitable and inexplicable when Ricky finds her, rapping on the door lightly to get her attention.

“Hey,” he greets her when he enters, hands shoved in his pockets.

“Hi,” she returns, skimming her fingers along the keys without actually pressing down on them.

He sits beside her at the piano, his knee knocking against hers when he sits close, the smell of coffee on him overwhelming her senses. “Sorry about earlier,” he says quietly, and she knows that he’s referring to the entire stilted experience in her apartment.

She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. Kourtney and I. . . It’s been kind of complicated recently.” A potential understatement of the century. In nearly two and a half years of friendship, Nini can’t remember a time when Kourtney’s ever been this mad or this annoyed or this whatever it is she currently is with her.

“Complicated how?”

She presses down on the keys where she’s placed her fingers, eliciting a single chord from the instrument, and says, “TiMER complicated.”

“Ah,” he answers, and he places his fingers on the keys, mirroring her hand positioning, and plays the chord. She knows Ricky well enough to know that he won’t question her on that any further and isn’t surprised when he changes the subject. “Will you play something for me?”

She turns to look at him for the first time since he sat down. “Like what?” She shifts her feet on and off one of the pedals. “Are you thinking a Beethoven? A Chopin?”

Ricky seems to consider this carefully, lolling his head from side to side, before he asks, “How about a Salazar-Roberts?”

A smile flickers across her face, and she turns back to the keys, straightening her shoulders like she was reminded to do so for years of piano lessons, and aligns her fingers carefully on the keys before beginning to play.

When she plays, it’s easy to forget, anything past her and the music fading away for at least the length of a song. The world feels heavy on her shoulders more often than not, loneliness and uncertainty and fear weighing her down, but when she spins songs out of nothing, pulling notes and laying rhythms in rows, it feels like she finally has the answers to the questions racing in her mind. And she knows that she plays and writes well, which isn’t something she says from egotism but from the sheer fact of the matter that she wouldn’t be in the program she is, embarking on the tenuous career path she’s on if she weren’t. But still, she knows that she needs to be better, carry herself with greater artistry and continue to hone in on her own voice as a composer.

She feels Ricky’s gaze on her as she plays but doesn’t look over at him until the last note fades under her fingers, and she finally lifts her hands from the keys, placing them in her lap. He looks at her in unmistakable awe and adoration, his lips parted slightly, just like last night when she thought he was going to say something, and she looks back at him expectantly, waiting for him to do so. But he doesn’t, seemingly content with staring at her until she has to look away first, her chest tight from the reverence in his gaze.

“There you have it,” she says, trying to keep her tone light despite the heavy mood that blankets them. She turns towards Ricky again. “A Salazar-Roberts. Any thoughts?”

Instead of answering, he leans in to kiss her, sliding a hand up her cheek and into her hair, holding her close as he kisses her deeply. It doesn’t feel like any of the other times they’ve kissed—her heart isn’t racing, electricity doesn’t course through her, she doesn’t feel like she’s about to combust in a sudden, fiery explosion. But she does feel like she’s on fire, like a steady burning candle, and her heart beats in her chest, a thudding reminder in her ears that she’s alive and Ricky’s here and that this kiss is different.

She wishes she could put her finger on why.

\---

Now that Kourtney knows about her _whatever_ she’s doing with Ricky and still won’t speak to her, she figures that there’s no point in keeping him away anymore, and they study side-by-side one night in her room.

“I’m done,” Ricky declares suddenly, snapping his textbook shut and tossing it off the edge of her bed. “Let’s make out.”

She’s about to tell him that he might very well be over studying for the night but that doesn’t mean she is when he starts to kiss her neck, his lips trailing down to her collarbone, and if she’s solidified anything for herself over the past few weeks, it’s that she’s not very good at not kissing Ricky.

But she forces herself to have a little sense, and attempting to get his attention, asks, “Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” Break starts next week, meaning there’s one last good weekend of parties before everyone leaves campus for break and then they all return to the crunch of finals. Case in point, Ricky and his roommates are throwing a party for E.J. on Saturday since his actual birthday falls the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Ricky pulls away with a grimace twisting his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Mom gets Thanksgiving, Dad gets Christmas.”

He doesn’t talk about his parents often, so she’s limited to knowing that they’re divorced, presumably TiMER-related based on Gina’s prior comments, and that his dad lives in the Bay Area like her moms, only two towns away from where she grew up and will be returning to for break. He shifts, her question evidently squashing any desire he had to make out, and lies down, his head on Nini’s thigh while his legs stretch across the length of her bed.

She keeps her eyes straight ahead, unable to look at him as she asks carefully, “They got divorced when you were in high school, right?

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “Junior year.” She feels his head brush against her hand and looks down to see Ricky leaning into her touch, his eyes full of quiet pleading. She lifts her hand and threads it through his curls, running her fingers through his hair again and again.

“They had TiMERs, right?”

He peers up at her, caught off guard, but nods, his head bumping against her leg at the motion.

“Did they have different countdowns?”

Ricky is silent for a long moment, and Nini, internally battling her desire to know and her nervousness that she’s overstepped into a territory that they never encroach, continues lacing her fingers in and out of his hair. “Not initially,” he answers, his voice quiet, and he doesn’t look at her when he continues, “They timed out together at first. But um, one day, my mom’s restarted.”

Nini tries to hide any surprise that passes over her face, but multiple soulmates are rare and even more rarely discussed. No one knows if it’s intrinsically tied to a new addition to the TiMER data base, a better match for you entering the fold, or if it occurs when two people naturally grow apart, but she’s heard of it happening—people coming into your life for a reason or a season.

“And that’s how she met Todd,” he says bitterly, rolling his eyes when he looks up at her, but the look in his gaze reveals something softer, sadder than his tone. “My dad’s still hasn’t restarted.”

She doesn’t even know what to say, but she thinks of her moms and Seb and Carlos and even the random soulmates that she’s watched time out together, all of which contribute to her own steadfast trust in the TiMER even when her own hasn’t given her much of reason to. If she had to watch her own parents fall out of their match, she can’t imagine maintaining that level of faith.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, but it doesn’t feel like enough. “That’s awful.”

But he shrugs, and she can tell that he’s trying to regain some sort of levity when he says, “It gets easier, you know? Over time.”

Without thinking, she rakes her fingernails gently over his scalp, and he smiles at the feeling, his eyes drifting shut, and she thinks of the TiMER on her other hand and her soulmate, whoever that may be, out there somewhere, and she can’t help thinking that his words are further from the truth.

Later, she walks him to the door, knowing it’s a tiny grace that neither of her roommates are in the common area. It allows her, before he’s out the door completely, to request one more kiss, tugging on his hand to pull his mouth back to hers, holding the door half-open between them. He smiles into the short, sweet kiss, and she finds herself unable to stop herself from smiling too.

Her smile still plastered on her face, she shuts the door behind him, locking up, and jumps when Ashlyn says out of nowhere, “You seem happy.”

Her roommate hovers in the entryway to the living room, partially shrouded in the dark with only one living room lamp on, and they meet in the middle at the kitchen table.

For Ashlyn’s part, Nini knows that she’s found herself caught in the middle of her and Kourtney’s tension, playing a tenuous peacemaker as she maintains a friendship with the both of them. She knows that she and Ashlyn are fine, but on the whole, hasn’t introduced Ricky to her more than in passing. It’s just been easier this way.

“He’s cute,” Ashlyn offers, but she can’t stop from wrinkling her nose. “In a boy kind of way.”

Nini laughs but appreciates the attempt. “He’s a good guy.” She thought she knew that when Gina said the exact same thing, but now, he’s even more intertwined into her life, the pre-Ricky timeline becoming an even further, distant memory, and she thinks that her life is better for it.

Ashlyn gives her a small, knowing smile, repeating, “And you seem happy.”

The implication of what her relationship with Ricky might be—or could be—settles over her heavily, and like all the other times the thought has briefly crossed her mind, she brushes it off, letting out a shaky laugh. “I don’t know what it would even feel like to be happy with someone like that.”

Ashlyn’s smile turns sad, the look in her eyes not dissimilar to the reaction from strangers when they find out Nini’s got a blank TiMER. “But if you saw the way that you looked at him—”

Nini cuts her off gently. “Ashlyn, can we not talk about it?”

Ashlyn holds her gaze for a long moment before she nods, giving her a reassuring smile. “Yeah, of course.”

Nini reaches out to place her hand over Ashlyn’s, an unspoken thank you, and injects a brighter note into her tone when she asks, “Are you ready to meet your soulmate?” The girl’s TiMER has surpassed the 24-hour mark, the minutes sliding away, and she’s set to meet her soulmate tomorrow night, thirteen minutes after 11 p.m.

Ashlyn exhales shakily. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Nini nods, solemn. She can’t imagine how she must be feeling, standing on the edge of a cliff before taking the leap, freefalling into the rest of her life. “Ricky’s throwing a party at his house tomorrow,” she says suddenly. “You should come! Maybe that’s where you’re supposed to meet your soulmate.”

“Are you sure?” Ashlyn asks, giving her a wary look.

Nini nods, genuine excitement seeping through her. “Totally sure.” Ashlyn’s going to meet her _soulmate_ , and she’s really, truly excited for her because no one deserves a better one.

\---

**_Meet the one with one-hundred percent accuracy._ **

Ashlyn is officially panicking. She agreed to come to E.J.’s birthday party, and given her countdown and the likelihood of meeting someone new here, it appears that this will be the backdrop for Ashlyn to meet her soulmate—which unfortunately has only sent her nerves into an increased frenzy. When they trail through the party, Nini catches Ashlyn checking her wrist again, nearly walking face first into one of E.J.’s teammates before Nini pulls her out of the way, and in an attempt to distract her friend, she drags her away to introduce her to everyone.

She finds Ricky and Big Red in the kitchen, greeting them both before throwing an arm over Big Red’s shoulders. “This is my roommate, Ashlyn,” she says, and she lightly hits the other girl’s hand back to her side when she begins to reach to check her TiMER. Ricky tilts his head in question, and Nini adds, “She’s set to time out tonight.”

Big Red lights up. “With someone we know? I can’t wait to say I knew you both when.”

Ashlyn grins weakly, and when Ricky asks if either of them want a drink, Nini accepts on both of their behalf, hoping that it will marginally lessen the high frequency that Ashlyn’s running at or at least give her something else to do with her hands. It does seem to help, and Big Red and Ashlyn begin discussing the latest season of Doctor Who on the BBC which helps even more, but no one, least of all Nini, is prepared for what happens next.

There’s an old Flo Rida song on, definitely an E.J. pick if she’s ever heard one, and Ricky slides over a second drink to Ashlyn which she lifts to her lips when everything seems to wind into slow motion. Gina skips up to them, and Ashlyn turns to see who the new person is, meeting her gaze, and then, faster than anyone can take a breath, two TiMERs beep together loud and clear, leaving their entire circle in stunned silence.

It’s easy for Nini to imagine how Ashlyn might feel in this moment, because she herself is finding it difficult to get any amount of oxygen to her brain, and the floor beneath her feet feels like it could give way at a moment’s notice.

Gina and Ashlyn.

Ashlyn and Gina.

“Hi,” Gina says finally, and her voice is softer than Nini’s ever heard it before. “I’m Gina.”

“Ashlyn,” she says, and she sticks out a hand for the other girl to shake, a silly formality for the person that you’re going to be spending the rest of your life with, but Gina takes her hand in hers.

“You’re—”

“Nini’s roommate,” the two girls say together, and smiles appear on both of their faces at the way that their thinking overlapped. They continue to stand in silence, not yet releasing each other’s hands.

“Right,” Big Red announces, but Gina and Ashlyn don’t even seem to hear him. “I’m going to go.”

She feels someone grab her elbow and pull, and it’s Ricky, who quickly adds, “Yep, us two,” before dragging her backwards out of the kitchen.

Once they’re away from the pairing, she trips over her feet and asks, “Did you know?”

Ricky turns to her. “About Gina timing out tonight?” He shakes his head.

Nini doesn’t know what she was expecting when Ashlyn was going to meet her soulmate tonight, but it wasn’t _that_. It wasn’t supposed to be someone she knew, not one of Ricky’s friends, not _Gina_ , and the unexpected turn has knocked the wind out of her. She thought she’d built herself up a bit more solidly as of late, finding a solid ground in her new normal but turns out that she was just a flimsy house of cards this whole time.

Pulling Ricky in a new direction, she starts off down the hallway and opens the first door that they reach, tugging him into his bathroom. He watches her with a raised eyebrow when she pushes herself up to sit on the edge of the sink counter, urging him to come closer. He steps forward, positioning himself in between her legs, and rests his hands on her thighs, and she loops her arms his neck to eliminate any remaining space between them before kissing him.

Maybe it’s the tenuous footholds that she finds herself in or the feeling that she’s about to boil over for a reason she can’t quite name, but she moves her lips against his urgently, tugs on the curls at the nape of his neck insistently, trying to get him to keep up like it’s a race against the clock—except there _is_ no clock, and that’s the entire problem in the first place.

Her throat tightens from what she hopes is from a need to breathe, but she ignores it, pulling gently on his hair in her hands once more, and she should take pride in the way he groans into her mouth, but she doesn’t, and she can feel her eyes watering, no matter how tightly she squeezes them shut, which brings a fresh wave of panic as one trails down her cheek. Now unable to stop the tears that spill over, she breaks their kiss, tucking her chin to her chest as she allows herself to cry more freely.

“Nini,” Ricky rasps, reaching out to shake her lightly by the shoulders, but she brings up her hands in front of her chest to create any kind of physical divider between them. Concern is etched into his features, but his lips are swollen and red, making him impossible for her to look at. “Nini, please, did I do something wrong?”

She can’t stop the tears as they fall, but she tries, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She sucks in a shuddering breath before the words begin to rush out. “No, no, this is my fault. I’m sorry, I just. . . I still want that.” She looks up him now pointedly, and she sees the recognition of Ashlyn and Gina, of soulmates, dawn on him before continuing, “I want to time out with somebody, and I want the guarantee of my soulmate. I know you don’t believe in it, but I do, and I want it. I thought I could handle this, but I—I can’t. I _can’t_. I can’t do this anymore.”

She moves to get around him, but he doesn’t remove his hand from her shoulder. “Wait, Nini—”

“I need to go,” she says, not daring to look at him as she jumps down from the counter. She thought telling him would reduce the anxiousness rising in her throat, but her chest feels tight, something fracturing in her ribcage.

“Stop, Nini—”

“Ricky—”

He latches onto her wrist, anchoring her in place and finally catching her gaze. “Nini, please, I—”

But the words die on his lips, and he looks at her helplessly, his boyish sincerity shining through. She swallows hard before asking, “What?”

He doesn’t even falter when he tells her, “I love you.”

Weeks ago, she had meant what she said when she told Ricky that she believed that she could have a TiMER lead her to her soulmate and that she could fall in love, truly and sincerely, with that person. Yet, despite dreaming and aching for her soulmate from the very beginning, the falling in love of it all never occupies much of her thinking. It makes sense, of course, because her mind can never wander too far into loving her soulmate when she doesn’t have any hint of who they are in the first place. But still, she always thought and hoped and frankly assumed that those three words would come in due time. She certainly never thought that, when she’d be on the receiving end of _I love you_ for the first time, it would be the worst thing she’s ever heard.

“No,” she breathes. She wrenches her arm from his grasp, steeling herself when she repeats more firmly, “No. You can’t say that. You can’t say that to me, not when you know how I feel about soulmates and not when you know how you feel, or don’t feel—”

“But you have to know that I love you,” Ricky insists, his eyes shining, and his voice cracks a little. “And I know you believe in the TiMER and that you want to time out with someone and meet your soulmate, but isn’t the entire point of having a TiMER finding the person you’re meant to fall in love with? Because I’m right here, and I love you—”

“Stop saying that,” she pleads, her voice strained with desperation, desperation to get away from him, desperation for him to stop whatever he’s doing to make her heart race like this, and she feels a second wave of tears coming.

“No, Nini,” he repeats. His hair is mussed from her hands, and she aches to run her fingers through it once more, gently combing it back down. “I love you.”

She balls her hands into fists at her side, digging her fingernails into her palms until she knows they’ve left a mark. “I have to go.”

She turns to the door and pulls, hearing Ricky say one last time, “Please—”

And then she closes the door quickly, the click as it shuts delivering the final blow to her cracked heart as she leaves the boy who insists he loves her behind.

\---

The next day, she wakes up from a dreamless sleep, her eyes puffy and red from the way she’d been unable to stop crying after racing home until her tears seemed to just run out, her own body exhausted with her sadness. It doesn’t help that, when she gets out of bed and catches a glimpse of herself in her mirror, she looks categorically awful, and it’s still not even close to how terrible she feels.

She pads out to the kitchen to make herself coffee, startled to find Gina and Ashlyn seated at her kitchen table. It’s jarring, her two disparate worlds converging, but when they both turn to look at her, she figures that she should get used to the image now that the two newly introduced halves have come together.

“Hey,” Ashlyn greets her brightly. “Where did you end up going last night?”

Gina’s grin is blinding. “Were you with Ricky?”

Hearing his name alone feels like a slap to the face, and she inhales sharply. “No,” she replies, clipped. She disappears into the kitchen, her back to the two, and begins to make breakfast, pointedly ignoring the way that she knows that they’re staring at her.

And Ricky must allude to something happening between them as well, because later, she gets a text from Gina telling her that she understands if Nini doesn’t want to talk about what happened but that she’s here for her if she does. It’s a small comfort, knowing that Gina still cares for her as a friend since she is Ricky’s friend first and foremost—though it figures now that Gina’s woven into Nini’s life in a new permanent way as well.

Before she can be questioned too deeply about Ricky, Thanksgiving break arrives, and she’s on a flight home to the Bay, leaning into the tight hugs that her moms greet her with at baggage claim. “Welcome home,” they tell her, and she squeezes a little tighter before letting them go.

Thanksgiving break gives her the opportunity to will herself to get up, go about her day, and live her life. She meets up for a late-night diner run with her theater friends from high school, sipping milkshakes and reminiscing on their senior year production of Beauty and the Beast. She makes mashed potatoes, side by side with her lola, and fresh hand-whipped cream for their pumpkin pie. She switches from iced to hot lattes now that the holiday season is upon them. She goes into San Francisco for a day to play tourists with her friends, snapping pictures in front of the Golden Gate and running after each other through the hairpin turns of Lombard Street. She goes on a run, reads a book, and scrapbooks with her moms, her supplies spread out on the living room floor while an episode of Friends plays on the TV.

She doesn’t let her thoughts dwell for too long on boys with messy curls or warm, brown eyes or ink-stained fingers or that smell like coffee, because time is continuing to move forward, and so should she.

\---

**_Take the guesswork out of love._ **

Once she’s back on campus for the handful of weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break, it’s easy to ignore the ache of missing Ricky with a tightly packed schedule of wrapping up classes and preparing for her finals, most notably her semester showcase with Seb.

She doesn’t have to try very hard to avoid him on campus since seeing one another was always a concentrated effort on both parts. The physical distance is there all on its own, and it’s more so a shift in what had become routine: trips to Pause Café, nights at his house, seeking each other out whenever possible like two magnets pulling towards one another once in the same orbit. So, she keeps herself in her separate orbit—no, a separate universe entirely—and this should be all there is to it.

Except it’s not. She still feels it, missing Ricky a constant reminder thrumming under the surface alongside her broken heartbeat, and she doesn’t know how to lessen the ache other than, perhaps like he’d said himself, that it’s supposed to get easier over time.

The night before their semester showcase, Seb and Nini get together for one final practice, and she sits beside him as he plays through the piece once more in its entirety. It’s not lost on her that she wrote the composition in a completely different headspace than the one she’s in now, evident by the assured rhythms and the sweet, swelling melody.

“It really is a beautiful piece,” Seb comments, pulling her from her thoughts. She hadn’t even realized he’d finished playing.

“Thank you,” she says softly, and even though she knows he’s waiting for any performance notes, she says instead, “When did you know that you were in love with Carlos?”

Seb blinks at the sudden change of topic, and he draws his hands off the keys to settle in his lap. “I don’t really know if there was an exact moment. I think, in part, the very first time that we met since I knew right away that he was exactly what I’d been waiting for, but I didn’t even know him at that point, you know? That was the foundation, but it was everything from there that built upon it—getting to know him beyond our TiMERs, becoming a part of his life, then building one together. And along the way, it just. . . happened, I guess.” His smile is soft and wistful when he turns to her. “That’s not really helpful, is it?”

She laughs, shaking her head. “Not really, but.” She considers his expression and what she’s been privy to in their relationship: Seb gushing over their first official date to the state carnival where they shared their first kiss at the top of the Ferris wheel, the musical movie nights that they host on a monthly basis which includes an intermission to play Dance Dance Revolution, helping Carlos bake a disaster of a lemon poppyseed cake for Seb’s birthday because it was the kind his mom always made for him growing up, the adoring way that they’ve always looked at one another from the start. “I get it.”

The performance the next night goes off without a hitch, of course, and she catches Ashlyn, Gina, and Carlos in the audience, cheering them on, clapping a little too loudly for a class showcase, but she finds herself smiling regardless.

After the showcase concludes, their professor insists on gathering the composers and performers for a group photo, and Seb asks her if she wants to grab a late-night dinner with them, but looking at the twin soulmate pairings before her, she shrugs him off, saying that she’s not really hungry. She’s not really looking to be a fifth wheel—tricycles can function with a purpose, but there’s no such thing as a five-wheeled bicycle.

She enters her apartment to see Kourtney at the kitchen table, eating Rocky Road ice cream straight from the pint. “Hey,” slips out before she can stop herself.

“Hi.”

And it’s basically the most cordial that they’ve been in months, a realization that weighs her down a little more than usual. Kourtney twirls her spoon in her hand, dragging it through her ice cream, before she says, “I thought you’d be out after your showcase.”

Nini shrugs and takes the seat across from her. “Didn’t feel like it.”

Kourtney raises an eyebrow. “Not even with—”

“Nope,” she cuts her off quickly, and understanding crosses the other girl’s face. Nini gives her a tight-lipped smile before adding, “This is where you say I told you so.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Kourtney says quickly, and Nini refrains from rolling her eyes, no matter how badly she wants to, because she doesn’t want to bring the conversation to a sudden halt. Kourtney sets down her spoon and sighs. “I was _going_ to say that I was jealous, and I’m sorry.”

The words are an unexpected wallop, and she opens her mouth, only managing to choke out, “Jealous?”

“Yeah,” Kourtney says, speaking more to her ice cream than to Nini, and she sighs again, determining her next words carefully. “I mean, it was always the two of us with our fucked-up TiMERs. And then. . . then you had your one.” She looks up at her finally, her face twisted with regret, sorrow, loneliness, everything—Nini would know after all, that exact mix of emotions dragging her down since the day that her TiMER was installed.

And Kourtney’s words resonate. Their TiMERs had been one of the first commonalities that the two girls discovered they shared as confused freshmen, sporting lanyards and imperfect countdowns. She feels a new emotion added to the swirl, sympathy, but still, she lets out a watery laugh, because Kourtney has no reason to feel left behind. “Ricky’s not my one.”

Kourtney gives her a pointed look, but her tone isn’t unkind when she says, “Nini, how many people have we seen get matched right in front of us? And they all have that look?” She allows herself a small nod. She knows the look. “That’s how Ricky has always looked at you. And that’s how you have always looked at him.”

She shrugs, drawing her shoulders in. She doesn’t think it’s true despite Ashlyn having touched on the same sentiment prior, and besides, it doesn’t matter now that Ricky isn’t looking at her at all. She feels stupid for wanting to cry, having worked so hard to rid herself of all Ricky-related tears over the break, but her eyes well up anyway, Kourtney blurring before her. “I don’t know how my soulmate could be someone who doesn’t believe in soulmates,” she says quietly.

Seeing her tears, Kourtney reaches out to take her hand, and it’s a small comfort, a kind that she hasn’t had in weeks. Kourtney squeezes her hand gently before she says softly, “Crazier things have happened.”

\---

After avoiding any sign of ginger hair for two weeks consistently, Big Red finds her in the library, and just like his best friend, he yells out her name, earning him more than a few dirty looks from the heads-down students studying for finals.

“Big Red,” she says, stunned. She’s never seen him in the library or even within a fifty-foot radius.

He clamors into the seat next to her, speaking insistently and still too loudly, “Ricky won’t tell me what happened between you guys, but clearly, _something_ happened, and I need you to—”

At the sight of others staring at her, she shushes him once more, leaning in and motioning for him to do the same to speak more quietly. “Nothing happened,” she tells him, but he only stares back at her like a petulant child. “I just realized that. . . being with Ricky wasn’t the right thing for me.”

Big Red’s gaze softens, his mouth slack. “But I thought he—he said that he—” He shuts his mouth finally, evidently realizing that he can’t say exactly what it is that he wants to tell her.

“It’s for the best,” she says, ignoring the churn in her stomach that says otherwise.

Big Red opens his mouth again but is interrupted by a loud beep from between them. Nini freezes at the noise, a sound that her laptop has never made before, one that’s certainly not her phone, and the only other option wouldn’t, has never. But she finds herself checking her wrist anyway, tugging up the sleeve of her sweater, a gasp catching in her throat when she sees _––d ––h 22m 49s_ blinking at her from her TiMER.

Big Red drags his chair closer to look at her wrist. “Did your—”

“Yeah.”

She looks up at him, her shock mirrored on his face, and he asks, “Has it done that before?”

She shakes her head dumbly. “Never.”

Big Red checks her TiMER again. “That’s so soon.”

22 minutes and 49—well, now 32 seconds—and counting. After wishing, hoping, waiting for her soulmate, they’ve appeared suddenly, soon to be close enough to touch, allowing her to put a face and a voice to the person she’s supposed to be spending the rest of her life with. Her mind catches on that—supposed to—and she finds herself speaking before she considers the weight of her words. “I don’t care.”

“What?”

Nini shakes her head more fervently now, certainty clicking into place. Her TiMER has started, her soulmate on their way to her, and she doesn’t care. “I don’t care. I don’t care who it is. I’ve waited for this for so long, but I. . . I don’t care.” Why doesn’t she care? That answer comes even faster: the boy with stupid puns who gave her Oreos with peanut butter and Star Wars movies, who has only ever done everything she’s ever asked of him, who loves her despite having no guarantee. “I need to find Ricky.”

“Ricky?”

“Yes,” she repeats insistently, throwing her laptop into her bag. Her TiMER is about to guarantee that her soulmate and her loving someone are mutually exclusive, and if she can only have one, she wants Ricky. She wants Ricky a thousand times over, and a ticking countdown on her wrist can’t tell her any differently. “Where is he?”

“Work, I think—”

Great, thanks, and bye tumble out of her mouth in rapid succession as she throws her backpack over her shoulder and races out of the library.

\---

She can’t run from her countdown, but she can run to Pause Café, her chest tight from the exertion of her full-on sprint and the anxiety that’s flooding her senses. After all this time of her soulmate leaving her high and dry, barely able to keep herself above her consuming loneliness, _now_ they decide that they care? Just when she’s come to find that she feels for someone the way that TiMERs advertise you should? What on Earth could have compelled her soulmate after all this time, all the fractures and splinters that her heart has had to endure, to get a TiMER today?

She already hates them, and she hasn’t even met them yet.

She reaches Pause, wrenching the door open only to see the grumpy girl with the pierced eyebrow working the espresso machine. “Where’s Ricky?” she demands, slapping her hands onto the counter. She knows that she probably looks deranged, sweating and holding the stitch in her side, but she doesn’t care.

The girl gives her a wary look and continues making a macchiato. “I don’t know,” she sneers. “He called out today.”

Oh, _God_. She double checks her wrist to see the last full minute slip away, giving her fifty-nine seconds until she meets her soulmate. She whips her head around. Is she supposed to meet her soulmate at Pause? What kind of sick joke is that?

With fifty seconds left, she looks around frantically, spinning in a circle, briefly considering hiding in the bathroom despite knowing better. That would just guarantee that she meets her soulmate next to a toilet.

  
With forty seconds left, she thinks of Seb, falling in love with Carlos slowly, moment by moment instead of all at once, and wonders if that’s possible with her own soulmate when she finds her heart pulled to someone else.

With thirty seconds left, she finds herself trembling all over, on the precipice of the freefall into the rest of her life.

With twenty seconds left, she thinks of her moms, not timing out together but how they met before TiMERs were even on the horizon—at a crowded coffee shop in San Francisco, sharing a table together because no other seats were available, discovering that they both loved Joni Mitchell and took their coffee the same way.

With ten seconds left, new panic courses through her, her heart racing off-kilter, and she hugs herself, fighting and failing to keep the tears that spring to her eyes. Her soulmate is going to think she’s a wreck, and maybe she is. Maybe they’ll realize that they don’t want her at all and she can find Ricky and—

The thin strip on her wrist times out with a soft beep, coinciding with the chime of a second TiMER. She takes a breath, heart in her throat and looks up.

“It’s you,” she says, the words whisper thin.

“Yeah.” Ricky lifts his shoulders in a tiny shrug. “It’s me.”

And it really does feel like a freefall, her vision narrowed, feeling utterly senseless outside of being able to see Ricky, her soulmate, standing in front of her. He steps closer to her, hesitant, before taking her hands in his, and it’s the physical reassurance that he’s here and this is real that she didn’t know that she needed that allows her to exhale. If this is the freefall, then she’s found the softest place to land.

“I know I said that I didn’t need a TiMER to tell me if something was the real thing, and I don’t,” Ricky says and then says once more, firmly, “I _don’t_. I never needed a TiMER to tell me how I felt about you, but I wanted a chance to prove to you that this was—that this _is_ the real thing.”  
  


The tears she’s kept at bay since her TiMER beeped to life spill over, streaming down her cheeks, and Ricky brings one of their joined hands up to wipe them away gently with his knuckles, causing her to choke out a laugh before saying, “I love you. I love you so much. And not because this told me so.” She holds up their intertwined hands once more, angling her TiMER towards him. “I think I’ve loved you for a while now, and I’m so sorry it took me so long to catch up.”

He laughs now and drops her hands to cradle her face in his palms, close enough for her to kiss, his nose brushing against hers. But she sees regret flash in his otherwise adoring eyes. “I’m sorry I left you waiting for so long,” he whispers, swallowing hard. “If I had known that a TiMER would have meant finding you—”

  
She cuts him off with a tiny shake of her head, telling him, “It’s okay.” And she means it, any former ill will towards her soulmate dissipating, because she knows her soulmate now and knows their reasons for keeping her waiting. And without his meaning to, this has made their meeting even sweeter, her love for him already setting up camp in her healed heart.

Besides, as she promises him, “We have all the time in the world.”

**_Happily ever after, guaranteed._ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who left kudos/comments on part one - always appreciated and i hope you enjoyed part two! per usual, i thrive on validation so let me know what you think and im on twitter @lovealwayskt :)


End file.
